Winnipeg Free Press February 10, 2021
by Randall King
A group of five Sisler High School students contributed animation to a Netflix short film that may be in the running for an Oscar.
The film is Cops and Robbers, an eight-minute animated short currently streaming on Netflix. The project spun off from a spoken-word performance by actor-writer Timothy Ware-Hill, filmed in the wake of the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed, 25-year-old Black man, shot by a white resident of his Georgia neighbourhood while jogging.
Ware-Hill himself went jogging to film himself reciting the piece he had written years earlier, made sadly relevant by Arbery’s killing. Co-director Arnon Manor had the idea of embellishing the video with animation from around the world with the objective of creating an animated “quilt” in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Sisler High teacher Jamie Leduc, who also served as an animation and scene supervisor for the Sisler contribution alongside instructor Bernard Alibudbud, says the school was approached for the project by Digital Domain’s head of animation, Jan Philip Cramer, who had visited the students of Sisler’s animation program in late 2019.
“He fell in love with our students,” Leduc recalls. “There’s something about our students and a lot of people just feed off their energy.
“Move forward to June 5. He sent an email out of the blue and said, ‘Hey, Jamie, do you have a few minutes to talk about a project?’”
The project was Cops and Robbers.
“He said, ‘Listen, a good friend of mine, Arnon Manor, is trying to galvanize the animation industry and get behind Black Lives Matter and he found a fabulous piece called Cops and Robbers online and he would like the animation industry to animate it,’” Leduc recalls. “It would require us to animate one line of the poem and see where it goes.”
Five students — John Hildawa, Chantal Philippot, Aaron Raymundo, Anjali Sidhu and Matthew Tardaguila — stepped up.
“The next thing we knew, we had a group of students connecting with Jan Philip Cramer on a Sunday, and on Monday we had a Zoom call with all these different animators from around the world, from these big studios and also independent people,” Leduc recalls.
“And we were the only high school,” Leduc says. “What an honour!”
“Over the span of three weeks in the month of June, our students had a five-second scene and Arnon and Timothy spent maybe three or four one-hour blocks with the students, breaking down the scene and doing like a critique of every frame and every pose and really trying to understand what the student wanted to do with the scene,” Leduc says.
“They got to choose the line they wanted and then they actually got to plan it out visually. Timothy and Arnon didn’t give them any criteria except for just being as artistic as you want and trying to bring this scene to life.”
The scene in question illustrates Ware-Hill’s line: “Even when Black is in the light, people still don’t see s–t.” The students came up with an encounter between a black woman and a white woman on the street in which the white woman seems to walk through the black woman as if she were invisible.
As brief as it was, the moment was notable for Ware-Hill, who said in a recent interview with Deadline:
“The way that Sisler High interpreted that line was so moving and so powerful to me,” he said. “That’s one of many, but that’s the one I wanted to highlight, as far as a moment that really stuck out to me.
“I gave a lot of history, and a lot of personal experience and perspective in all of our chats to our artists — whenever we discussed a line, what it means,” Ware-Hill said. “And with that line, I said that Black women are the most invisible beings on this planet, the most forgotten, the most disrespected. And yet they are the backbone. As we just were reminded of during this (U.S. presidential) election, they are the backbone of this nation, yet they remain invisible, even in the Black Lives Matter movement.”
“I cannot be more proud of the five students that worked on this. Chantal and John and Aaron and Matthew and Anjali, they just put their heart and soul into this,” Leduc says. “And what a fantastic way of ending their time at Sisler High School.
“They just finished their final project and they jumped on this just because they felt that they could put their skills into something that they care about,” Leduc says. “They could actually make a difference in the world and that’s such an amazing thing as an educator to see that.
“Bernard and I could not believe the amount of time and energy and passion that they put into this project,” Leduc says. “They are true artists.”
randall.king@freepress.mb.ca