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Pakarnyk Alan
After graduating from the University of Manitoba's Fine Arts program in 1972, Alan Pakarnyk turned to animation as a way to combine his love of colour, motion and drawing. With a grant from the Canada Council in 1976, he used his highly detailed drawing style in an animation called Daydream, which won awards at festivals in Chicago, Ann Arbor and New York, as well as showing at Cannes and Annecy.
He began Adam's Dream in 1975 with support from the Canada Council, the Manitoba Arts Council and the Winnipeg Film Group, and completed it in 1989. In 1985, for the National Film Board, he completed Carried Away, a mixed-media fantasy about the power of imagination. The film's style anticipates the potential for playing with images that later became possible through computer animation.
In 1991 Alan was Artist in Residence at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he began his study of computer animation. He has since completed several pieces for CBC's Sesame Street and the musical animation Black Lake in 2002 for BRAVOfact, both combining hand-drawn and computer-animated images.
Terra was conceived in 1972 but was not completed until the computer technology needed to create it became widely available. Released by the NFB in 2005, this animation uses radiant spalshes of colour in a kaleidoscope of motion to depict nature at work.
