Polyester Studio animates what it means to be Canadian

Polyester Studio is an animation and production studio based in Toronto and it was tasked with visualising what it means to be Canadian as a celebration of the country’s 150th year. The project is a collaboration with the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and sees Polyester animating a talk by film director Clement Virgo entitled The Canadian Experiment.

The talk was pulled from TIFF’s archive who provided the live footage for a number of interviews with filmmakers on the subject. Polyester selected the interview it felt would work best and started the process of animation. As a way to give everyone a voice, the studio divided the script within its team to allow each member to bring their own perspective to the words.

The animation features a colour palette of red and white with accents of light yellow and pink which provides cohesion to an animation that features a few different styles. “With a team that consists of animators currently going through the process to be Canadian citizens and others who only recently became official Canadian citizens we wanted each person to provide their own visual ideas to the subject,” explains Jeremy Dimmcock, who co-founded Polyester alongside Bob Zargorskis. He went on to say, “the only stipulation was to avoid using a maple leaf if possible as it was too obvious an icon.”

Polyester worked on the piece over several months. Ideas and concepts were explored in the storyboarding phase so that everyone knew how each section would work together. However, the studio allowed the piece to develop naturally, making changes where necessary in a process Jeremy calls “controlled randomness.”

This system of working, coupled with seamless transitions between scenes, creates an animation that truly reflects Clement Virgo’s vision of Canada as having “a culture that is diverse, a culture that is still growing and discovering itself… The idea of what it is to be Canadian is still evolving.”