A local art director earned international recognition April 13 during Vancouver’s ELAN awards – formally known as Canadian Awards for the Electronic and Animated Arts.
Zoe Evamy won international recognition for her work as senior art director on the animated TV-series Zeke’s Pad, a Canada-Australia co-production. Evamy, who is senior art director at Vancouver-based Bardel Entertainment, won the 2009 ELAN award for Best Art Direction.
It’s the third consecutive year Evamy has won an ELAN. The awards were introduced in 2006 to celebrate the talent in the $1.2 billion-a-year video gaming and animation industries.
This year’s win was even more special, Evamy said, because the ELANs were open to international submissions and judging for the first time. She competed with 15 other entries from four countries.
“It’s a huge honour to be recognized by my peers, especially this year in the international arena. With budgets and schedules getting tighter every year, it’s more and more challenging to pull off a consistently good-looking show.”
While already airing in Australia, Zeke’s Pad will start showing next year on YTV, a Toronto-based nationwide specialty network. It is about Zeke, a 14-year-old skateboarding dude with a vivid imagination and a penchant for drawing.
When Zeke finds a totally wired electronic drawing pad, the things he draws come to life. His new-found power almost always backfires, so Zeke and his friends find themselves in all kinds of bizarre situations.
“My work usually starts once the main characters are designed. That’s when we start imagining the world they live in and how it reflects their personalities and the episodic storylines,” said Evamy.
Zeke’s Pad, which also won a 2009 ELAN for Best Animated TV series, takes up a large chunk of Evamy’s time and ensures a hectic work pace.
“During the production of Zeke’s Pad last summer, you would have found me running between Bardel’s three buildings in Gastown; juggling visual development on new story ideas, helping new art directors get their shows up and running, and supervising three summer interns. It’s very energizing and exhausting at the same time.”
Evamy works with a small team of designers to develop a visual style for all new animated shows that are optioned by Bardel. In her spare time, Evamy is a painter and supporter of the local arts community in Squamish – she’s a board member of VISUALS, the Squamish Valley Artists Society, and the Squamish Arts Council. Evamy says her painting provides a balance to the intense pace of her animation work.
“With short deadlines it’s natural to fall back on the artistic formulas you can rely on. With my own art, I can explore and learn from happy accidents without the pressures of clients and deadlines. In some ways these experiments get stored away until I can use them again under more controlled circumstances. There is a lot of movement in my paintings and I’m not sure if this comes from my 20 years in animation or if I’m inherently drawn to movement and change.”
Evamy’s paintings will be on display at Galileo Cafe at Britannia Beach in July and August and during VISUALS’ ArtWalk in September.
