Green Man from "Utopia Cafe"
16mm sections of television series, 1994-1996
(ADDITIONAL IMAGES FROM "UTOPIA CAFE")
REMASTERED GREEN MAN: 2016 with Erik Sirke
This was a tv show produced by Stephen Hall in Regina. It was made primarily for CBC tv. Stephen hired me to animate a couple of title sequences for the first season, most notably the “Tanya Talks” titles. In the second season, he hired me to do more extensive animation. It was the summer of 1995 and I was in intercession at grad school so come September I left town again. I made a lot of material that year, dedicating myself to at least two new ideas every day for the two months I was employed. Unfortunately, some of the work proved inexplicable to the editors so much of it never made it to screen. For the third season I was offered the position of "senior animator", which meant that my micro-department was furnished with "junior animators". At first this seemed like a great idea. I was able to work with a very young Allan Dotson who came up with a great image of cyborg monkey fetuses in water bottles. However, by the end we had discovered that the group dynamic had separated us from the tone desired by the producer and, as seems obvious it retrospect, the producer's opinion is the only one that matters. To fulfil our animation quota, I began shooting sequences of “Green Man” stories. He is one of those wooden puppets painted green by Margaret. I made about six or seven stories but only three aired. My contract with the show allowed me to retain rights over the footage I shot, so I held onto the 16mm negatives for those sequences until 2016 when I had a 4K transfer made from them. I brought Erik Sirke into the project at this time, showed him the existing edits (by Dean Evans) and gave him license to rework the film. The resulting re-edited re-mastered versions, edited and scored by Erik, premiered at my exhibition at the Art Gallery of Regina in the summer of 2016.
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