Melt your Heart
Recent graduate Samantha Leriche-Gionet’s charming four-minute animated film, Snowflakes and Carrots (Flocons et Carottes) is on a world tour of sorts, with festival stops in New York, Chicago, Switzerland, Italy and right here in Montreal.
On Aug. 31, it was one of several Concordia films screened in the student component of the Montreal World Film Festival, known as the Canadian Student Film Festival.
“Showing your work is always stressful but I know it’s part of the process,” says Leriche-Gionet, who won the animation department’s Prix de la cinémathèque québécoise for excellence last April. “I love seeing how the audience reacts and I’m always hoping they won’t notice the little mistakes.”
Watching her film, it’s easy enough to get immersed in the story of a young girl who steals carrots off snowmen. The storyline is simple but the carefully crafted 2D animation and sound design complete the package nicely.
Leriche-Gionet admits that animating can be painful – Snowflakes and Carrots is made up of 1860 drawings each scanned and coloured on the computer. Sometimes her hand aches from the process or her body doesn’t want to keep going. But once she’s finished a scene, the sense of accomplishment is overwhelming.
“You’ve made something come alive. And then you sit back down and you do some more,” she says.
Concordia’s strong presence at the FFM comes as no surprise. Every year students, grads and faculty are well-represented in numerous categories. Without Wings by former cinema faculty member Jo Meuris is described as a celebration of the human body in motion. The Hidden Face of Suicide by Yehudit Silverman from creative arts therapies is an award-winning documentary about people who have lost loved ones to suicide.
Another year, another slew of accolades for Concordians: in the student festival, Neil Rathbone and Fraser Munden took home the top prize for best film, the Norman McLaren award, while Paul Tom’s Que Je Vive En Paix was selected best animated production.