Animation Heroine

Animation Heroine: How did you become interested in film and animation? Was your prior degree in graphic design a factor?

Sarah Saidan: I was in the last year studying graphic design when I took a course on animation, it was then when I first saw my drawings become alive and since have never preferred to do anything other than make animation films.

AH: Were there any particular films or artists that made you interested in creating your own work?

SS: Yes of course, I think it is was Michaël Dudok de Wit’s incredibly poetic short films that touched me the most in the first years I was studying animation. At that time the internet was not used so widely like today and the connection was super slow in Iran, so it was very hard to find short animated films. I remember collecting images of animation shorts I hadn’t even seen!

AH: If someone were interested in learning more about women animators from Iran, whose work would you point them towards?

SS: Maryam Kashkoolinia is one of the most talented Iranian animators who has mostly worked with sand. Her films have been internationally successful and personally I love them.

Above: Still image from Maryam Kashkoolinia’s “When I Was a Child” sand animation. Source [here].

AH: Is working on films in France very different from your experiences in Iran? If yes, how does the filmmaking process differ?

SS: I think producing animation films in France differs from any other country. France has a huge respect for animation and auteur films in general and a lot of financing goes into these films. So from my point of view, it’s kind of a heaven for an animation filmmaker, though I’m sure my French friends won’t agree, which is kind of natural!

On the other hand in Iran independent animation studios who produce short films are almost non-existent. All the government funding goes into one single animation studio attached to the national TV which produces mostly propaganda films and series. So you can imagine the difficult situation young animators are in. Almost every short film that comes out of the country is done on personal budgets.

We hope for better times to come!

Speaking of short films, your own, Beach Flags, has been gathering attention! I loved seeing the title in English, French, and Farsi. Did you speak all three languages growing up?

SS: Oh no! I couldn’t speak one French word before coming to France! But English was always easy because I was born in London and spent the first years of my childhood there, I learned Farsi and English at the same time. Wish I knew more languages but I am yet to perfect my French!

AH: What was the process of working on Beach Flags like? How did you start research?

SS: Women athletes’ situation in Iran has always concerned me. They are in a difficult situation. Especially swimmers. I did many interviews with them and they told me as they cannot be seen in bathing suits in public spaces, they are not allowed to compete in international competitions. To me this sounded outrageous.

Then one of them told me that surprisingly Iranian women lifeguards have won in some lifeguard competition. I couldn’t understand how that could be possible, then after some questions I understood that in sportive lifesaving, there are many games, and there is one that is called "beach flags,” a 20 meter race on the sand to pick up batons. And since this game doesn’t take place in the water, the girls can participate with headscarfs and completely covered. This was good news, but at the same time I had this ironic image of swimmers running on the beach and not being allowed to participate in swimming competitions. I had to do something with this image that would not leave my mind.

Above: the poster for Beach Flags, courtesy of the artist.

AH: What challenges did you overcome on Beach Flags, and how did you find solutions?

SS: I think the challenging part of the work was making the balance in describing the situation. Providing an introduction to the lives of these girls without explaining too much. I knew I had two completely different kind of viewers, so I had to make a balance, for the foreign viewer to understand the situation rapidly and at the same time not make it too explanatory to the Iranian viewer who is familiar with it.

At first I really didn’t want to have dialogue in the film. I fought for it for a while. The producer from ARTE.tv channel who had pre-purchased the film insisted that the story is too complicated for foreign viewers without dialogue. I realised that they were seeing the story from a completely different point of view, which was true. So I added in dialogue – in Farsi.

AH: As you mentioned, it was hard for you to see short animated films in Iran and sadly many are not online yet. Will there be a way for Beach Flags to be seen in Iran, such as the Tehran animation festival?

SS: There was no way that Beach Flags would pass the censorship of that festival. I have a private link to my film online, which I send to whoever wants to see it.

AH: If you were just getting started in animation, what advice would you give to your younger self? Is there anything you would have done differently?

SS: I used to think that I should’ve studied cinema before animation, but today I think very differently. Animation becomes magical where it gets the farthest from cinema, at least for me. I would advice my younger self to just draw, imagine and read more poetry.

Above: A photo of La Poudrière, the school in the Rhône-Alpes area of France that Sarah attended. Image source: [here]. To learn more about La Poudrière, this short film is an excellent introduction.

AH: You did your BFA and MFA in Iran, but then decided to come study at La Poudrière. What influenced your decision to come to France, and how has the education differed from your work in Iran? Was La Poudrière the first time you tried stop-motion?

SS: La Poudrière focuses on directing animation films and it’s for people who already have experience in this field. I still have not heard of any other formation like this anywhere around the world. It is very unique in its method: there are no teachers there, animation professionals come to the school for short periods and guide us on each film project. What we do during the two years is basically we make films and learn how to pitch our projects. I could not resist applying to this school even if I didn’t speak French at the time. Those two years in La Poudrière were an amazing experience, tough at times, but very productive. And yes, it was there where I used the opportunity to try stop motion, it was so much fun!

AH: Is there any medium within animation that you most enjoy working in (stop motion, 2D, digital, etc.)?

SS: I mostly draw and I think it is the technique that gives me the most freedom, but I also enjoyed stop motion a lot. Sometimes it is the story that defines its own technique, so you’ve got to see what is best for the way the story should be told.

Above: Still image from Sarah’s TED animation for “What Are Human Rights?” Source: YouTube.

AH: Your most recent TED animation and Beach Flags both have themes of civil rights, and recently you have been working on aiding Syrian refugees in Jordan with another project. Do you consider your work political or feminist in any way?

SS: Honestly, I don’t know how these projects found me, but I am happy as hell to be part of them! I am extremely excited about these new projects I am getting. I am definitely a feminist and being Iranian, politics directly effect my personal life, so it should be natural that my work reflects a little bit of that I guess.

AH: What kind of projects are you most interested in working on next or are you working on right now?

SS: Women’s issues are especially very interesting to me. I have been thinking and writing a script for my next film for a while now, but since it is a very personal topic and a feminine issue, I have to face my reservations and doubts, it is a challenge, and I love challenges!

AH: Were there any particular story challenges on The Secret of Kells or Song of the Sea that stand out in your mind? Either challenges or learning experiences?

NT: Oh, huge, yeah, huge. Yeah, both of them were massive learning experiences for me. Kells because at the end of the day it’s a story about a Viking invasion on a monastery which had to have real impact and which had to have real sacrifice. For that to happen in a film that looks very much like it’s for children, then how to balance that and how that’s where we really started to think about layering storytelling.

Because actually, talking about From Darkness, I remember the first time getting a shock seeing that in an audience, where there were some children, and thinking “Oh my God!” and the same with Cúilín Dualach, the second film that I made, the child with a backwards head—

AH: In 2004—

NT: Yeah, it was the same thing again, I remember getting a lot of push back from funders on that about the ending because I really wanted to end the film in the graveyard with the father kind of accepting, having accepted his son, and leaving it at that. And we had this kind of, another ending on it, and I remember thinking at the time wanting to be really purist about it, but then you have to think of your audience, and have to protect your younger minds.

In a way, or in support I guess rather than protect, and to be responsible for everybody in your audience as much as you can. To have them come with you, and to meet you half way, but you have to respect them, I guess, and that’s what both of those projects, Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea, taught me. Was how to do that, in as much of a responsible way as I can.

And the same with Song of the Sea, because it’s a film that’s dealing with loss, but in a way where we didn’t want to sell out everything that came before it, we needed to end the film in a way that made emotional sense. But in a way that it’s—it’s a sad film—so is Kells, and there are sad things in everybody’s lives, and in children’s lives, too. And it’s about adults helping children deal with that rather than pretending it doesn’t exist or that everything is reversible, because things aren’t reversible.

AH: That’s a really, really lovely thought, I like that a lot. There is a certain amount of gravity to both films in terms of conveying that to various different audiences. Secret of Kells, perhaps, a slightly older set than Song of the Sea, and how that works on a story level for you—did you feel that Song of the Sea had to be simplified story-wise so that children could understand it in a different way?

NT: Song of the Sea had to be simplified in a way that—it was funny, because it was a film with magic in it, and magic creates so much exposition, and rules, you have to make your rules with magic before you can start doing magic stuff, basically. That’s what was hard about Song of the Sea. Because again, and I’ve seen this with audiences coming out, you’ll have dads with glassy red eyes coming out, and the kids will be like, “Yeah! Ben and Saoirse are okay!” at the end of the film. So it can have two completely different emotional impacts on different ages. So that’s great.

But what was a big story challenge on Song of the Sea was to, for us to concentrate on the family, the central family, as much as we could, and not let the magic get in the way of that, I think that was huge for us. And to not over-explain things if things weren’t—you know, if you look into the logic of it—I think if something makes emotional sense, and your characters are true characters that behave in a way that they don’t contradict themselves, people will follow that and they’ll forgive you anything else.

AH: Did you have any magic rules? Anything that you really had to follow?

NT: Oh, God. You know, more what it was, initially we were trying to be true to the actual Manannán mac Lir [fun trivia bit: Mac Lir means “son of the sea”], and Macha, and all the characters that were in it—the Tuath(a) Dé Danann and all the rest of it—we were trying to bring in as much folklore as we could, but we ended just simplifying way down and making the character’s relationships, the magic characters, just be what they needed to be to suit the purpose of the film rather than be too true to what the actual folk characters were.

AH: And that’s true for a lot of the films that you’ve worked on, that they have been adaptations of existing material in some way, shape, or form.

NT: Yeah, yeah, I guess so. I mean Kells, because we don’t know a lot about how the Book of Kells was actually created, I mean it gave us a huge amount of freedom around it, but yeah, we had the book to kind of draw from I suppose, literally. With Song of the Sea, with the whole selkie tales, there’s lots of material there. But again, there were kind of specific takes on them. I suppose no story is new, y’know?

AH: Always.

NT: It’s hard to find something. With this next one, with The Breadwinner, it’s an adaptation again of a book, but it’s I think something new in and of itself as well because I’m very much a firm believer that if you’re adapting a novel and that it’s particularly for animation, it has to be an animated film, something that stands up for itself and justifies itself really.

AH: You were talking a little bit earlier about putting your own filter on the adaptations, that you are always sort of the lens through which you’re viewing the original material. Is that true with the Breadwinner, too?

NT: Yes. What struck me very much about The Breadwinner when I read the book was the character, the central character, Parvana, and how she is something we haven’t a lot of in film before. How a character like her is such a strong character, such an amazing arc that the character goes through, but it’s a very simple story, there’s nothing super human, she’s just a normal kid. She’s not even a normal Western kid. She’s an Afghan young girl, yet she has traits and values that we all have just because we’re human beings. The challenge of bringing that to an audience is pretty tremendous because I’m an Irish white woman making a film about a place I’ve never been to, y’know? [laughing] But I hope that as an artist, and as somebody who draws like I did when I first held a pencil that I have enough empathy in me to create something that makes connections, I guess.

AH: Can you tell me a little about the visual style of The Breadwinner?

NT: Yeah, so it’s a less, um… Well, how can I style of The Breadwinner right when we’re at the beginning of production?

AH: It’s true.

NT: It’s a strange one, yeah. What we are attempting to do is create a Kabul where there is beauty in small things. This film is about light and dark, it’s about dust, it’s about shafts of light, it’s about characters moving through environments in a way that where you feel like you can step into it, yet it’s still a 2D film. It’s a film about contrasts, so we have story-world kind of look in the film, but we have real-world look in the film, and the two interplay. And how the two interplay, I guess, is something. So, if that’s some kind of answer, I can’t give you a much broader one at this point, I think, maybe in two years’ time come back and I’ll have another answer for you! [laughing]

AH: Sounds very fair. [laughing] And somewhat similar to other films that you’ve worked on, where light has been very important. Can you talk about maybe any running themes that you see in your work? If you look back on your films are there things that stand out to you as being more or less important, either visually or story-wise?

NT: Well, I guess if you’re talking about purely things of visual interest, how 2D characters move through light is very striking, I guess, and it creates such an area of visual interest, but you can load it with lots of… So if you have this, you have a character moving out of shade into light, but they’re 2D characters and you have all kinds of elements in the light, to do that plus tell a story on many different levels and have an actor performance into that whole thing too, you have lots of layers of storytelling going on there that keep people interested. In a way, I think that that means you can say a little bit more with a little bit less. That’s what light does in our films, and certainly with this one, with The Breadwinner, that we’re really trying to explore.

AH: One last quick question before you go. If you were to look back on your work, and try to describe it to somebody who has never seen any of your films, is there something that you would tell them about your work—that you would say, that’s something that I identify with and that that’s important to me, something like that?

NT: Hmm. I think me, personally…

AH: As a director—

NT: Yeah, yeah.

AH: I know it’s a really hard question, I’m sorry.

NT: It is. What would I say that is the thing I identify with, or the thing that that’s me! [laughing] I don’t really know how to describe what I do because I’m kind of good at nothing and good at everything? [laughing]

AH: That’s not true either! [laughing]

NT: Well, in a sense that I’m not a professional storyboard artist, but I can storyboard. I’m not a professional voice director, yet I can voice direct. I’m not a professional composer, yet I can talk to a composer in a way that we share a language. The same with an editor. So I know a little bit about a lot of things, I guess, is how I would describe myself! [laughing] And I know enough to hopefully get some truth across in a character’s story that can in some way make somebody’s day a little bit nicer, I guess, I dunno! [laughing]

Animation Heroine: And how did you feel that you wound up learning that? Was it really through doing those greeting cards, or what did you find most effective?

Nora Twomey: Kind of, yeah. But certainly when we started doing shorts, and started taking raw material. Like with From Darkness [2002], it was the skeleton woman, the folk tale, which we were trying to interpret that in a new way, really. And the same with my second short, which was taking somebody’s short story, Jackie Mac Donncha, who’s an Irish writer. We took his short story and tried to interpret it in a way that worked for animation and could work for children and that, y’know, so. Always taking a nugget of something, whether it be an idea or somebody else’s story or something like that and trying to interpret it in a new way, a way that suits animation and a way that can communicate something new or some different levels of thought I guess, that’s what it is for me.

AH: Were the shorts sort of testing grounds, then? Or did you feel like they were complete films?

NT: I don’t know! At the time, I very much felt “That’s it, that’s a complete film”. And you have the same sensation as when you watch a feature that you’ve been involved in afterwards, it’s like—wsssh!—that’s it, I can’t watch it anymore, it’s done, y’know? But short films are a fantastic medium, and they’re a thing in and of themselves. And they’re not really for me, they’re not—well, I mean, you do experiment a lot in shorts and you do use things in features that you use in shorts—but short film is a fantastic medium in and of itself and I think it’s self-justifying.

AH: Was there anything in short films that you felt you could adapt into your feature work, now, that you learned from doing short films?

NT: I think for me personally, being able to work within a team, let’s say, and make everybody feel like they own the film, and own their department, and own what they’re doing, and can communicate with other people around them and everybody that needs to be on the film. But also for the person who is heading it up, and for me in this case, to able to take the whole thing away, and to structure it in a way that, y’know, pulls everything together, and that’s a very personal process, I think, really, in a sense.

And then it becomes a very public process when you have a huge team of people and you have to communicate all the things you have to understand, what it is, in this film, that you want. Above all else what it is that you feel you can communicate to an audience, the story that you want to tell, yourself, above everyone else, really, and then to communicate that to as many people as possible so that you all can work on the one thing together in the one direction.

AH: Speaking of very public films, of course, The Secret of Kells was immensely public and making that leap from short films into feature films was also tremendous for you all. What was that transition like, working from short films into feature films? Were you starting to feel more established? What was the atmosphere like for you, working on The Secret of Kells?

NT: We were, yeah. Because we had set up the company with the intention of making The Secret of Kells, so we always felt like it was inevitable, like it would’ve been a surprise to us if we hadn’t made it, you know? That was what we were for, basically, was making long-form projects. And because it was kind of incremental, it never felt like—well, I suppose it did, yeah—at the beginning of the production there was like a big sense of, “Oh my God, this is it now! This is real, and we’ve got loads of other people’s money and we have to do it justice and we have to do them justice,” and all of this. But because there were a lot of us, I think, and because it was Ross Stewart, who was the art director on The Secret of Kells, as well as y’know, Tomm [Moore, co-founder of Cartoon Saloon], I don’t think it felt too lonely for any one of us. We all had something to contribute towards it. And maybe with me it was the experience on the shorts. I was able to contribute towards the film as much as I could, so it gave us all a sense of courage that no one of us was in it on their own, really.

AH: And of course you were co-directing with Tomm, so what was that relationship like? To have two directors on the film?

NT: Well, again, it was always Tomm’s baby. He and Aidan Harte, who had directed Skunk Fu!, the first TV series that we made, had come up with the project when they were still in high school. So it was always Tomm’s thing, and I came on then to help with story, fundamentally, really, because he had Ross [Stewart] with the design. Because the story had been kind of conceived by young adults, as a very dark tale for young adults, and as it developed and as we got our funding together and that, the project was pushed and pulled in a lot of different directions from lots of different forces. And so what it was and what it was supposed to be and who it was supposed to be for, and how you could sit a child next to an adult in the same cinema and watch the same film and both for them to get something out of it. We were dealing with lots of forces.

We had Fabrice [Ziolkowski], the screenwriter, came in on the project and helped us because it was very much a young man’s film we could say, as well. You know, there was no Aisling in it, so there wasn’t even a female force we’d say, within the storytelling. So to try and bring all those things on, I guess, that’s where I came in and worked very much on story and worked on the edit an awful lot before the film kind of went off and branched off into backgrounds and animation and all that, you know. And then once the posing—I contributed a lot to the animation and the posing and all that kind of stuff as well—but it was more the story.

AH: So Aisling’s your baby!

NT: No, Aisling’s not my baby! [laughing] Aisling is Fabrice Ziolkowski’s baby, the writer, who very much looked at the script and said, “Where are all the women? Where is there going to be a female element in the story?” So, no, she’s not my baby at all. And very much, actually, Aisling came from Tomm’s son, Ben, who had a friendship with a young girl from next door and they had very much the banter between Ben and Aisling—is very much a reflection of Tomm’s observing his son and her, his friend. So no, but, y’know, it’s animation. The Secret of Kells I think is very much a tribute to Tomm’s vision, really, for the film, Ross’s fantastic artwork, and then us as a team kind of pulling in everything that we had to try and support everybody and the project as much as we could really to try and get the thing done, because it was such a huge task for us to do and at the time in the company where we had gone from, as you were saying earlier, a company of what—ten or fifteen people, to 75—in a really short space of time, everything was massive for us. We were buying computers, saying, “Can we afford this?” y’know? [laughing] It was crazy! I’m starting to hyperventilate thinking of it.

AH: No no, it makes life really stressful!

NT: It was very, very stressful, but it was great at the same time because we’re getting to play with actors. That was my first time directing actors so that was really massive and something I learned an awful lot from, directing experienced actors versus directing small children, eight-year-olds, that kind of thing, that was a huge thing. And being familiar enough and confident enough in the story that we were telling that you could direct them. Here were people that were standing in a darkroom with a script in front of them, a microphone, and trying to create the world for them so they know how to pitch their performances.

AH: And do you think that that partially came from story, in terms of facilitating that kind of experience for the actors?

NT: Yeah, and going back to college, we had done little bits of acting workshops and that’s where that came from, you know. When I was a kid, we used to—we had cassette tapes and we would record ourselves, myself and my sisters, and you know, all of a sudden, it directly links on. I always think of myself as somebody who still gets to play with dolls, except I am an adult and the dolls are now actors, you know?

AH: [laughs] That’s a really interesting way of looking at it, I hadn’t thought about that one specifically. Of course, in Song of the Sea, you wound up relegating yourself to Head of Story rather than actually taking on a directorial role, was that a tremendous shift for you in terms of responsibilities? How did that feel?

NT: No, no! We don’t—there isn’t much ego here, to be honest, you know, in this studio. And really people do—like on my new film, Tomm is doing some storyboards, you know, but he could take any role he wants, really, on the film—but he goes where he’s useful and at whatever time, and me also. At the time of Song of the Sea, I had two small children, very small children, and I wanted to continue creatively as much as I could, but also to respect my reality, which was I had two small children. They would come into work with me, and be beside me and that, but also I needed to go home at five o’clock or six o’clock in the evening and that was just the reality of my situation. But this place has evolved to be such a place. And I mean, it was always the culture here because when we started up, Tomm had a very young baby. So it’s always been a place where you can wheel in a buggy beside you, the baby can suddenly get really stinky, and the person beside you doesn’t really mind, they don’t care. [laughs]

AH: It’s like bringing your dog to work! Maybe the baby’s a little stinkier.

Nora Twomey: Well, I can tell you my name!

Animation Heroine: Let’s start with that! [laughing]

NT: My name is Nora Twomey, I work at Cartoon Saloon, I’m one of the founding members. I’ve been here for sixteen years now or so, oh gosh… A long time. I am a director, a storyteller I would say by trade, I can’t really call myself an animator anymore because I don’t even hit a quota of five seconds a year now. [laughing] So, yeah, storytelling is my interest, and where I think I have most to do, I guess. I’m married, I have two kids, and lots of complications.

AH: [laughing] As always, as do we all. You grew up in Cork, of course, but after you had done that sort of high school period in Cork, what made you interested in animation?

NT: Ah, yeah, I had a rough enough time in high school and I left school when I was fifteen and I worked. My first job was making dolls, actually, pre-production, antique, porcelain dolls. And then I worked in a factory for a couple of years, but I never stopped drawing. And I always drew from being the youngest—you know, my earliest memories are of drawing and trying to make sense of the world, I guess, with a pencil. So that’s never changed, and it never changed even though I rejected the traditional education system and I couldn’t function within it, I could draw, and it was my way of communicating when my words didn’t work or when, y’know, whatever I was going through. So for me, that was my way through things. And it was the one thing that I knew I was kind of good at… and something that I was so interested in.

So, I did a foundation year in Cork which is an art college kind of preparation course, and I continued drawing in that but then I discovered what fine art was. And at the time, fine art was much more about finding an object and writing an essay about the object that you found and putting it in a white room, rather than skills. And I guess what I was really interested in was skills, and developing skills, and finding what I needed to say through that rather than being a really young adult and trying to say something profound is something that, for me, that was kind of pretentious.

Animation wasn’t pretentious to me. Animation was something where I could explore storytelling and explore drawing and explore acting and all the things that I was kind of interested in, so that’s why I went into animation. I really didn’t—y’know, animation per say itself, I hadn’t been hugely interested in growing up. I remember the Disney films very much so and loved them, but didn’t get to go to the cinema very often, hardly at all, really. So, yeah, I kind of discovered animation in my 20s, really, [laughing] and loved it.

AH: Excellent! So after you had done this preparation year in Cork, you then of course went on to college [university], where you met some pretty fundamental people in your life, I would say! [laughing] What was that experience like, going to Ballyfermot?

NT: It was fantastic, it was really, really great. I look back on it with enormous affection. And I went to visit recently enough, actually, the students were graduating from there, and it was great meeting my old teachers. Ballyfermot was as much about the people I went to college with as it was the tutors [professors], I think. And so yeah, I met Tomm Moore and Paul Young, and Jeremy Purcell and Fabian Erlinghäuser, and all these people who I still work with all the time and those relationships kind of endured, really—and a way of seeing things, and an enthusiasm about about animation, and about art, and about storytelling.

And honesty, I think, actually, is something that all of those people have in common. There’s an honesty to what they do, and an honesty which overcomes everything, I think, really. So yeah, that’s why those relationships are so fundamental, really. And I think maybe it was a huge dose absolutely of naïvety about what we wanted to do and all this, and you need that, you need to not look too far into the future and just see the thing that is immediately ahead and go for it.

AH: Was there any good advice you received during college?

NT: Any good advice I received during college… I could go for the old chestnut, draw, draw, draw, which is true! You know, when I look at my own kids drawing without any sense of judgment of their own work and any sense of hesitancy or anything like that, I see that they just wsssh! put something down on the page, something that expresses, and they don’t care what you think about it. That is so wonderful. And that is something that I’m trying to capture in my own work and stop beating myself up on all my lines! [laughing]

AH: It’s a very, very hard thing to do, though.

NT: Yeah, absolutely.

AH: Were there any teachers you connected with particularly, or was it mostly your peers?

NT: Y’know, mostly my peers. I did learn a lot from the teachers that we had, we had a great guy called Eddie Holloran (sp?), we had Mark Burr (sp?), and—we had some really fantastic teachers—we had a teacher called Thelma Chambers, who taught me a lot about visual language storytelling which I still use on a daily basis. So the teachers were fantastic, and it felt huge to me because I had such, let’s say, failures in the education system to suddenly have teachers around me who understood what I was trying to do and understood what I wasn’t able to do and what I was able to do and try and encourage me, that was really, really great.

I always felt very self-conscious like I said about drawing, it’s always been a huge issue for me, kind of an emotional issue with me. Which I think in one sense is a good thing, because it means that it’ll—y’know, it’s never going to be something I can lie with, I guess, you know, in drawing. [laughs] For instance with the film I’m working on now, finding my way through that, through drawing, I can’t lie with my drawings because I’m so critical of my own stuff! [laughs] That for me, it’s a huge, even the most basic of storyboarding, whatever, it’s such a fundamental thing. So yeah, just the validation that teachers in general, whether they were people who came in for a couple of days from the industry or people who had been there for quite a time, it meant a lot.

AH: Do you remember the first film that you made?

NT: The first film that I made in—? You mean, like, the first film that I directed? [laughs]

AH: The first one that you finished at all, that you felt was your first film.

NT: Well, that would be From Darkness [2002], I would say. It was my first film with a beginning, middle, and an end that I finished! [laughs] Yeah, again, I never looked too far beyond what the next thing was in terms of what I could do with it. I mean we did a really rough storyboard, my husband actually storyboarded on that film with me. And he did the backgrounds as well, he did some fantastic work with that. But I remember going to see Lord of the Rings in the cinema the Christmas we were half way through with From Darkness and thinking “Wow, what wonderful sound design,” and then going [gasp] “Sound design for my short, my film! How am I going to do it? What does it entail? I don’t know anything about it!” and all that kind of stuff. [laughs] So I never really thought more than one department ahead, which was good because, again, I can be quite fearful of everything and in one sense, it’s a good thing because I plan, you know. But then it can be a bad thing as well because things can be overwhelming.

AH: Did it start to feel like you were focusing on story then, or…?

These commitments will be rolled out over the next three years, during which the public will be able to track progress toward these goals through updates on the NFB website which will provide complete budget allocation transparency. A recent report from nonprofit media organization Women in View showed that women represented only 17% of directors, 22% of writers and 12% of cinematographers in the Canadian film industry (from a sample of 91 feature films produced in 2013-14).

In making this commitment, the NFB is working toward growing these numbers and building on its leadership role in women’s cinema in Canada. In the current 2015‒2016 fiscal year, production spending on films directed by women at the NFB is roughly at parity, with 43.4% of production spending on films directed by women and 43.5% of spending on films directed by men, 11.3% of spending on films directed by a mixed team, and 1.8% of spending not yet allocated. That’s up from the previous year, 2014‒2015, when production spending on films directed by women was at 41.7% versus 47.8% on films directed by men.

The NFB also boasts high numbers of women in key creative and managerial positions: 55% of the organization’s producers and executive producers across Canada are women, as are 66% of persons holding upper management positions and 70% of Board of Trustee positions.

“The NFB has always taken a leadership role in women’s filmmaking,” said Claude Joli-Coeur, Government Film Commissioner and NFB Chairperson. “In our current fiscal year, films directed by women represent half of our total spending on production. In 2016‒2017, the numbers are projected to be well above that. But numbers can fluctuate. There have been good years and lean years for women’s filmmaking at the NFB. No more. Today, I’m making a firm, ongoing commitment to full gender parity, which I hope will help to lead the way for the industry as a whole.”

Opinion Editor Kayla Dwyer spoke with Guest about her documentary, her experience as a woman in the field and her hope for young women entering it.

Kayla Dwyer: What exactly is the documentary about?

Chrissy Guest: There’s a famous letter that Disney sent to all of the women applying to his studio. It’s a rejection letter that women would receive. … What it said is that women do not hold creative roles at Disney because they do not have the aptitude to do so, and therefore, you can apply to the ink and paint department — that’s where girls apply. … This letter kind of summarizes why the film was called “Beyond Ink and Paint.” … My film focuses on about five to seven historic women who contributed to the animation industry. It doesn’t matter if they were in a studio or not — we’re looking at the firsts. From there, we’re looking at the contemporaries of today — the women today of the industry who are winning awards, who are still making that ground way in the creative field of animation. And we’re looking at the struggles they still face.

KD: You have a lot of experience in the television industry. What inspired you to pursue this study in the animation industry?

CG: I love animation. … I was the art director at Channel 9 as well, and at CBS. So I not only directed and did the technical side, I did all their motion graphics. … When I came here to Ithaca College, I was positioned officewise next to professor Jason Harrington, who teaches animation here. I think it was fate, and we got talking. … I said it would be really interesting to do a gender studies course when you launch the [animation] minor, specifically on women in animation because we always talk about the men. … I knew if anyone could find the resources I need for the course, [communications librarian] Cathy Michael could, so you could imagine my shock when Cathy couldn’t. Because they don’t exist. So there’s no actual scholarly text on women in animation. … So I thought, “We need to change that.”

KD: Throughout your career in the media, have you seen attitudes toward women in media change?

CG: When I started in the industry directing in the control room, I was usually the only woman. But by 2003, there were a lot more women going into tech, so there would be two, maybe three of us at a time. … I was fortunate enough to get to interview then–first lady Hillary Clinton, but I was the only woman. I remember being selected as the pool camera for that. Pool camera means no one else goes. It’s just me, and then all of the stations in the surrounding areas have to get their footage from what I shot. That was really stressful because a lot of people can be very closed-minded and very mean. … I just felt like there were a lot of hoops. And there still are hoops, but if there’s one thing that women are, it’s that we persevere.

KD: Obviously there is still disparity in the numbers of female representation in the media, but how do you think we should look at those numbers? Is there a solution?

CG: At animation schools right now, 60 percent of them are made up of women, and they graduate. In the animation industry, those women only occupy 20 percent of the jobs. Where are they all going? My research over this coming summer is to address as an educator what needs to happen. Where is the support gap? Because it’s from school to work that the gap happens. It’s not in them graduating. They are graduating with the same tools as their male counterparts, so what is affecting their ability to enter the industry? … What is it that we can do as educators to help close that gap? I really believe mentorship is a big thing. … We, as women, also have a responsibility to mentor each other and help each other move up, and I think that is a lot of the issue, too — both men and women working to bridge the gap and make inequality nonexistent.

KD: What did you want students who attended the minicourse to get out of it?

CG: One of the things I deal with in advising students a lot is just preparing them to be more aware that the world is not always as wonderful as we make it here at school. … Things may not turn out the way you expect them to, that they would here. And that’s not OK, but I feel like I have to prepare students for that as well as prepare them for the challenges of being heard. … I hope a lot of the women left the class thinking, “I know what I need to do to make sure I’m including other women, and I’m not putting my own bias on them, and we’re not tearing anyone down for any choices that they make in life.”