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Quickdraw Animation Society will be closed over the Thanksgiving weekend of October 12 - 14, 2024

Smith’s illustrations take Key’s bleak story (dryly funny as it is) and gives it humanity, and in the process transforms a satirical dystopia into something more affecting.

This is animation at its most exuberant, a whirlwind of camera movements, neon colours and non-stop energy.

Quickdraw is popular and we're booked up for third party workshops!

Animation festivals sometimes get flack for leaning towards hand-drawn films over digital ones, and there’s definitely some truth to that. But if more of those CG films were easy on the eyes as Saito’s work, I think you’d see that balance shift pretty quickly.

We're closed cause we're all at the library to watch some amazing youth films!

Shaping a Dress (working title) will be a short film about an early 19th century tailor going through the process of making a dress for themselves as a way of coming out to their family. T

Cat Cabaret focuses on the strengths of strippers and showcases these women as the heroes they are.

It’s utterly absorbing, but also soothing (probably because of the mostly ambient score) and almost hypnotic.

Quickdraw is closed over the long weekend!

It’s a rare combination of profound and entertaining, and is as distinctive visually as it is in its ideas.

Let’s go full-out manic with this week’s pick.

It’s a tough film to interpret, with its mix of the domestic and the global, and its blend of cynicism and hopefulness.

In watching Hunger, it doesn’t take long to see that the software’s decisions on how to ‘tween aren’t exactly the same as what your average human animator would choose.

As much as he’s paying tribute to the ’90s animation underground, Bailey is also letting his own personality come through loud and clear, and the result is wonderfully odd.

Using morphs and experimenting with tactile media, this film will illuminate the dark psychological space of finding who one really is

Wind takes a straightforward concept and spins it into something special.

A look at the films that gave us genuine Flashbacks to the wonderful years of Lockdowns, all made throughout the May Long weekend this year.

Not sure where to start when you want to make a film? See how Quickdraw helps those who want to make their own independent animations.

It’s a difficult film, but one that feels particularly relevant right now

The QAS staff needs to recover after our Reunion weekend

Portingale’s film is all about the emergence of complex matter, the birth of the universe as we know it.

Join us in celebrating 40 years of Quickdraw!

We're gearing up for our 40th anniversary reunion (event To be Posted!) and need the classroom for some preparations!

Submit your version of Hamish D. Rat to be included on our 40th anniversary commemorative fundraiser t-shirt!

It’s spooky and soothing all at once, a unique mood from a unique artist.

it conveys energy and exertion and outright exhaustion with a practiced efficiency that’s nowhere near as simple as it seems.

Get a sneak-peak at what we're planning for our 40th year of QAS!

Did you watch the sweet horror hot dog animation for CUFF 2024? Take a look at how they used Blender and our Animator CUBE studio to mix practical and digital effects to pull off their short!

Maybe the most impressive thing about Skhizein is how Clapin mines empathy and humour from the same images.

Maybe the most impressive thing about Skhizein is how Clapin mines empathy and humour from the same images.

The end of the semester means the classroom is booked for final project creation!

It’s not a film to be scrutinized, but there’s something in watching its graceless critters lumber towards their destiny that can’t help but feel uplifting.

A ton of whimsy and a dash of Renaissance to create a three act visual spectacle from fruit decorating Paradise to Kimchi being the background of Hell

Hamish has some serious egg hiding to do! Spring Camp will run on Friday, but otherwise QAS will be closed Mar29-Apr1

So maybe it isn’t utopian, but it isn’t nihilistic either, and when you’re looking at the span of human history, that’s its own sort of optimism.

Rendered on a portable typewriter, you can see the film as Johnson’s daydreams manifesting through a dreary day job, the excitement of early aviation rendered in a few pieces of punctuation and some dabs of colour.

It’s hypnotic in a way that’s hard to describe, like staring at a fire—there’s something in the pattern of movement that’s just inherently compelling.

unlike most cut-out animation, which tends to treat its canvas like a two-dimensional platform, Voltova is more than willing to push her camera angles and distort her perspectives; it makes for a much more dramatic and energetic piece of animation than paper cut-out usually allows.

Instead of a puzzle to be solved, Panacée is a landscape to be admired, with gorgeous artwork that recalls Moebius' elegant lines, imaginative structures and twilit colours

It's as much about the beauty of the natural surroundings, heavily inspired by BC's Saltspring Island and the Pacific rainforests, as it is about the fox's journey, which is abstract at best.

The CRT glow and chunky lines recall old Amiga art, and the constant morphing between keyframes gives the whole thing an eerie feeling—more of a ghost of technology past than an exercise in nostalgia.

Lori Damiano's film compresses a lot of wisdom into 15 minutes, on the difference between observation and experience, the burdens created by the past and the future, the need for appreciation of simple moments.

It tells you the things the game will let you discover—it can even be useful in showing you the frame of mind the game is meant to be played in—but it's a different piece of art from the game itself.

Dr. Breakfast isn't exactly normal, but it is straightforward, mixing a crisp, traditionally cartoony style, an easy-to-follow narrative and a sense of humour that's alternately manic and deadpan.

It isn't easy to walk the line between irritating and charming, but the singing in Choir Tour pulls it off perfectly.

The straightforward style lets LaCerte focus on the story, a melancholy parable despite the presence of handsome horses and shiny bald strangers. It's downbeat, but it isn't a downer.

The annual Quickdraw Staff hibernation has been announced! December 17 - January 15

A delightfully weird and beautiful film of fun creatures making up their bodies and adapting to constant change in their unique ecosystem

We’re proud to share the winners of this year’s jury and audience prizes at GIRAF 19!

We couldn’t be more excited by the pure ambiance and rich emotional curiosity that exudes from the GIRAF19 promo bumper.

Calling all emerging filmmakers: What To Do When You Finish A Film is a resource meant for you whether your work was made in a class, on a kitchen table, or in a dark little studio! From Joanne Fisher's talk during GIRAF19

Quickdraw will be closed for Remembrance Day Holiday

Voices doesn't make you guess. It's direct, but no less deep for that, discussing fears and anxieties that haven't changed much in the intervening decades.

making your own movies isn't about having the fanciest technology, it's about having an idea, some determination, and whatever setup gets the job done.

Ten seconds into Jesse Schmal Strauss' Sub!, I was already 100% sold on it.

Deadpan humour and sincere existential yearning are an uneasy mix, and Ménard never really resolves the tension between the two moods.

The pervasive sense of melancholy, the dream-like story structure, the dark, dry humour; all of them create a mood that's hard to describe and equally hard to forget. 

We are closed for the long weekend as well!

Adding more colour to the world one step at a time and watching life go by is what he does best.

The pervasive sense of melancholy, the dream-like story structure, the dark, dry humour; all of them create a mood that's hard to describe and equally hard to forget. 

Quickdraw will be closed in honour of those those who survived the residential schools, and those who didn't make it home.

Brandon Blommaert's 2015 film e:e:e:e:e: might just be the most successful exploration of synesthesia I've seen.

In his words, it's "a lamentable tragedy mixed full of pleasant mirth," but the mirth is mostly in the contrast between Cross' golden age animation style and his willingness to follow through on a premise to its bitterest conclusion.

Join us at the Calgary Central Library for the youth screening!

the reason I keep coming back to it is less for the story, striking as it is, and more just to linger in its world a little longer.

Les Autres is a sci-fi collage in every sense of the word.

It's a character study of sorts, breaking down the concept of "bird" until it should be basically unrecognizable.

We're all going to be out of office to join the end of the BUMP festival, come on by!

You Could Sunbathe is wonderfully organic even in its most sculpted moments.

All you need is the film’s title and first few seconds, and you can see exactly where it’s going—sort of.

Everything you need to know about Saki Iyori’s 2013 student film is right there in the title.

We'll be back on August 8th!

It's a film about anxiety and fear, about the things that force us out of our comfort zones, and how good intentions don't always lead to good results. It just happens to convey all that that through fuzzy, lumpy monsters.

Whether there's a moral to it is up for you to decide—director Arthur de Pince flirts with some ideas around conformity, individuality and revolution, but none of them are particularly fleshed out

it's such a burst of cheer and refreshment that it seems perfectly suited to a late July afternoon.

Animation isn't about the quality of the drawing as much as the quality of the ideas, and Snake nails it on that front.

Animators Erik Alunurm, Mihkel Reha, Mari-Liis Rebane and Mari Pakkas' film is four minutes of perfect prat-falls and nauseous wobbles, set to the soaring strains of Bolero.

A look at the films that made us do double (sometimes triple) takes at our WHIPLASH Lockdown Screening event on June 17th!

Here's one from the QAS vaults, and you really couldn't ask for a better time capsule of Calgary in the 1990s.

As the object falls apart and reassembles, the memories fragment, too, giving an odd mixture of brightness and melancholy that never quite resolves itself.

I hope that my work connects to those still figuring themselves out, especially fellow young people of colour, and inspires them to freely create and live authentically.

Sijia Ke's film Pear is based on a true story. Maybe. It's based on a story, in any case — one that Ke was listening to on the radio, despite not speaking the language it was broadcast in.

Join us on Zoom to talk about Quickdraw's past year and future plans!

A fable about greed for greed's sake, it's hard to watch it and not be impressed by the generosity of detail that's gone into every scene. 

Due to our Animation Lockdown, we'll be taking a quick break afterwards to recharge!

A tiny film of cosmic significance.

For an entire year, the McLeod's drew one second of animation each day, basing it on something they had seen, heard or read over the course of the day, with a little creative license for good measure.

Loosely based on weird fiction legend HP Lovecraft's poem Night Gaunts and influenced by the visual style of early Polish animator Wladislas Starewicz, The Old Man and the Goblins is an impressive homage to both of its inspirations

Ugly but Good feels hand-made and grounded, and impressively tangible.

Free Swim will be back again on May 13th!

hi!

We will be back in the office again on Tuesday, April 11th!

Anne Breymann's 2017 film Nachtstück is, in a word, weird. Not in the hand-wavy, dismissive way that word is often used, as in "that was weird, I don't get it." Nachtstück is weird in a deeper, more unsettling way, the way that horror writer H.P. Lovecraft articulated almost a century ago in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature

Remembering Will Walton, and his over 2 decades of filmmaking at the Quickdraw Animation Society.

The range of moods it runs through in just over two-and-a-half minutes is astounding. The fact she can do it in such an intuitively appealing way is why she's an artist you absolutely should be following.

The first half of the film shows the unease that accompanies those restless nights where sleep never seems to come. The second shows that falling asleep isn't always so great, either.