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Joan

A surreal and minimalist version of the story of Joan of Arc. The film was created with stop-motion and pixilation animation techniques.

  • Pixie Cram
    Director
  • Katrina Bray
    Key Cast
  • Jeff Morton
    Music
  • Tina Le Moine
    Animation
  • Grant Harding
    Animation
  • Pixie Cram
    Animation
  • Pixie Cram
    Cinematography
  • Pixie Cram
    Editing
  • Project Type:
    Animation, Short
  • Runtime:
    6 minutes 30 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    November 30, 2014
  • Country of Origin:
    Canada
  • Country of Filming:
    Canada
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
  • Mirror Mountain Film Festival
    Ottawa
    Canada
    December 5, 2015
    Best Local Film
  • Dawson City Film Festival
    Dawson City
    Canada
    March 25, 2016
    Yukon Premiere
  • GAZE Animation Spectacular, Artists' Television Access
    San Francisco
    United States
    October 30, 2015
    US Premiere
  • NSI Short Film Festival

    Canada
Distribution Information
  • Groupe Intervention Vidéo
    Country: Canada
Director Biography - Pixie Cram

Pixie Cram lives and works in the Ottawa-Gatineau region. She creates fiction and stop-animation on themes of nature & technology, and war. Her films have screened at festivals across North America and have aired on CBC TV. Recent commissions include a video portrait of Philip Monk, recipient of a Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts, and a hand-processed film for the 10th anniversary of the Toronto 8fest. Pixie was the 2017 artist-in-residence at the Diefenbunker: Canada’s Cold War Museum. She is co-founder of the Windows Collective, a group devoted to the creation and exhibition of experimental works using film. In 2015, the Collective took their installations on a cross-Canada tour exhibiting from North Bay to Victoria. On top of her own art practice, she works as a freelance director, cinematographer and editor.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

Joan was created while I was artist-in-residence at Centre de production DAIMON in Gatineau, Québec. I wanted to create a film that looked like a moving painting. I tried to stay away from cinematic references to Joan of Arc because these are so well-known, and I worked instead with paintings and artworks about her from art history.

The first challenge was arriving at a desired result with the animation. To give an idea of the slow pace and precision that the pixilation involved, it would take us roughly 2 hours to arrive at 15 seconds of usable footage. The actors were responsible for performing the animation through their movements and facial expressions, so the effect is largely due to their technique and muscle control.

For this reason, I was very deliberate about who I chose to work with. Katrina Bray (Joan of Arc) has a background in physical theatre, and Grant Harding (the cleric) is a professional puppeteer. I was also assisted by animator Tina Lemoine in executing some of the more complex scenes, such as the pyre, that required more than two hands to orchestrate all the elements.

Working with the weight of the armour was also a challenge. Katrina had to move her body in very small increments and hold poses while we shot frame by frame, wearing about 70 pounds of metal. It took 30 minutes to get her into and out of the suit of armour each time we filmed. In one scene, she raises the sword above her head (a replica of a medieval sword that weighed about as much as the original would have). It required so much effort and concentration that she was sweating after 5 minutes of filming.

Composer Jeff Morton created the soundtrack. For the music, he took a fifteenth-century Spanish composition that I had been using as a guide track for editing and performed it on a piano keyboard.