Climbing to The Summit
Three years before Kyler Kelly started studying film animation at Concordia, his brother gave him a set of the complete works of Norman McLaren, a pioneer animator who transformed the National Film Board.
So it is fitting that Kelly received the Norman McLaren Award, Concordia’s highest animation honour. The prize was announced on May 5, as part of the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema’s annual awards presentation.
“It was really nice to win that award because McLaren is the animator that best represents the fine arts aspect of animation that I strive towards,” says Kelly, who graduates in June. “His work is all about experimenting.”
Kelly’s award-winning movie, The Summit, is an emotional story of two climbers ascending a peak and shows his dedication to experimentation.
“What is special about the movie is that it doesn’t follow the trend. A lot of animation is about looking more and more real, but in this movie everything is a watercolour done by hand,” says Kelly, who has a large tower of watercolour paintings of all of the movie’s characters, mountains and rocks.
The Summit took Kelly nearly eight months to create, dominating the final year of his undergraduate studies. Looking back at his time at Concordia, Kelly remembers his time as a teaching assistant with a laugh.
“It was a great experience in solving many, many problems and being okay when something goes terribly wrong,” says Kelly about helping with some of the program’s antiquated equipment.
“When someone is in the middle of a shot and something goes wrong with the film inside the camera — they are 50-year-old cameras — you need to turn off all the lights, open up the camera, feel for the problem, fix it and shut it. It’s literally working in the dark,” says Kelly.
Kelly has just submitted his film to an Ottawa film festival, the first step in his career as an independent filmmaker.
Related links:
• Concordia's Department of Film Animation
• Kelly’s Youtube channel