Chris Brown has often been compared to director John Cassavetes for his incisive ability to peel back the skin of intense human emotions in a way that feels both disturbingly intimate and deeply real. Fanny, Annie, and Danny, is as tightly wound as the characters themselves. Fanny, Annie, and Danny are dysfunctional adult siblings brought together by their horrific mother for the Christmas holiday. What seems commonplace on the surface becomes riveting in the details. In this family, even Christmas is not given its proper day.

We first meet Fanny, an obsessive-compulsive who lives in a group home and works in a candy factory on the brink of bankruptcy. Jill Pixley’s phenomenal performance ropes us in as she reconnects with her self-absorbed sister Annie and their too-perfect-to-trust brother Danny. Their Vietnam vet father may act like his emotions died with his friends on the battlefield, but the audience will glimpse the last few pulses of compassion the broken man has for those around him.

As with a tsunami building strength silently offshore, we sense the impending climax without knowing exactly when or where it will hit – or how hard.

Kristie and Tie-Rell, BFF’s from no man’s land, Arkansas, have big dreams and are determined to “clog” their way into realizing them. Kristie, a no-nonsense, blonde cutie dearly loves Tie-Rell, a Milli Vanilli throw back in tap shoes, and will do anything to make sure they succeed together…and she means anything. Despite their reality-challenged view of the world, these misfit dreamers believe they deserve riches and stardom – unlike their counterparts Michael Flattery and the desperate wannabes on America’s Got Talent – and are ready to prove it to anyone in their path.

This animation was based on a photograph taken during the month-long process of dismantling an office building in downtown Calgary, Alberta. It explores the inner structures of synthetic objects and devices as taking them apart disables their function. The filmmaker questions the waste of a perfectly good building being torn down just to build another one in it’s place.

Using watercolor paint on a stack of four or five sheets of paper is a stop-motion capture method. About 1200 frames were created using a Lunchbox frame capture machine running at 24 FPS. This animation process leaves little or no remaining tangible painted scene as things are constantly being torn away, broken down and saturated with water. A compact digital camera then recorded to mini-DV cassette and was imported into a computer. The sound elements were recorded onto an audio cassette and imported into the computer. This film was created over three days and 21 hours during the 2009 Animation Lockdown at the Quickdraw Animation Society in Calgary, Alberta.