Benjamin Woodyard knew that he wanted to do a video to music for his Grade 12 animation class project at Canterbury High School.
“I didn’t want much plot,” he said. “It was just kind of things happening to music, and correlating with it.”
Eventually he settled on All the Time, a gritty, grim quintessential Tom Waits song that set the tone for Woodyard’s minimalist pen-on-tracing paper short film.
Over the course of a semester, Woodyard drew around 1,200 frames to create the four-minute, 30-second video.
Woodyard’s video will make its world debut at the Ottawa International Animation Festival this October, where he’s hoping to follow in the footsteps of fellow Canterbury graduate, Will Inrig, who won the high school category.
“I have really no idea what anyone else is doing. I hope to win, but I don’t even know what the prize is,” he said.
Woodyard will be taking on other Canadian competitors in the High School Animation category as well as directors from South Korea and the United States.
The local contingent will be filled out by well-known animation artists, Nick Cross and Dave Cooper, who will debut their music video for Danko Jones’ “King of Magazines.”
Cooper established himself in the ’90s as an underground comic book artist before turning his attention to oil painting. Cross is an award-winning animator whose most recent short, The Waif of Persephone, competed at the 2007 OIAF.
This year, 98 films representing 20 countries have been chosen for official competition out of 2,185 entries.
