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About Joel Hamilton

Joel Hamilton is a dedicated film buff, and a man passionate about philosophy, hiking, biking, history, rock climbing, art, music, theatre, and literature. He has a background in theatre, photography, film production, journalism and writing by his Drama, and Comm Tech courses in high school, Red Deer College Teen Video Intensive, Fundamentals of Screenwriting at Mount Royal University, and the Journalism program at SAIT.

He has furthermore taken the Animation Fundamentals and Experimental Animation courses at Quickdraw, which inspire his 2014-15 Scholarship film project.

His early animation inspirations were Osamu Tezuka, Windsor McKay, Georges Méliès, Gaspar Noé, and René Laloux. For experimental works he is inspired by, Ingmar Bergman, Luis Buñuel, Zak Smith, Jean Painlevé, Jean Cocteau, Norman McLaren, Jean Renoir, Stan Brakhage, Standish Lawder, Ralph Bakshi, and Jean Vigo. Joel aims to create works that are ultimately his own vision, using materials such as plasticine, waterboards, sand, cut-outs, and film..

Image of a younger man, wearing a red t shirt, underneath a tiff sign that reads "What's on today" with various screenings

CJM Scholarship Film: M22079

.Joel’s 2014-15 CJM Scholarship film project is a mix of stop-motion techniques, archival footage, 16mm film, which is to be scratched and painted by hand using various experimental camera-less animation methods. It’s a portmanteau set during the aftermath of the Civil war and Te Kooti war, but before the Dust Bowl and Prohibition. He aims to take the structures and motifs of previous cinema and remix them to reflect his own imagination.

Joel loves the following films, and encourages anyone to seek them out: Andrei Roublev, Tokyo Story, Ordet, L’Avventura, Germany Year Zero, Alexander Nevsky, Children of Paradise, Berlin Alexanderplatz, The Leopard, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Rolling Thunder, Yo-Yo Milano Calibro 9, and Deep Red.