Faculty of Art

Experimental Animation

Gabrielle MacIntosh

You Can't Stay Here

You Can’t Stay Here is a risograph printed 2D animated short film that explores lived Queer loneliness and connection in Alberta, Canada. It follows an empty figure traversing the contrasting industrial and natural environments of the province.

“You Can’t Stay Here is a risograph-printed 2D animated short film that follows an empty figure traversing the industrial and natural environments of Alberta, Canada. This project was inspired by my own experiences as a lesbian who grew up in Alberta. It is a place I have a lot of conflicting feelings about. The film focuses on a specific memory from my teenage years: a sinking feeling I had in my gut and intense desire to escape. I did not care where I went, I just knew I had to get out. Though I was fortunate to have a few Queer peers my age, the conservative politics and conversations surrounding gender and sexuality haunted me wherever I went. I constantly felt the need to shrink in on myself or to disappear completely. The tone of this piece represents the many opposing feelings I had while growing up. I loved Alberta’s rich scenery, its nature always served to ground me and remind me of myself, while it also felt suffocating to live authentically.I wanted to visually explore Alberta from both of its sides- noisy industrial infrastructure contrasted with the silence and solace from nature that I found so much comfort in. All of the featured landscapes were influenced by film photos I had previously taken of places that impacted or resonated with me growing up, some of which date back 5+ years. I wanted to depict Alberta how I remembered it; focusing on how it felt, how it looked and how it sounded. It is a place of resilience and becoming just as much as it is a place of remorse and grief. My animation process began with digital frame-by-frame animation and the final frames were printed as a risograph, a process that is a merge of screen printing and photocopying. My stylistic choices for this piece stem from my background as a printmaker. I love printmaking just as much as I do animating, and I find that bringing digital animation to a physical print medium can really amplify different visual elements. Risographs can produce vivid colours that can't be replicated with other printers, and I used these unique inks to my advantage to expand and experiment with the vibrant colours that come with natural scenery.I hope that through watching this, audiences understand that there is no way to truly erase Queer communities and identities. By making use of absent portrayals of the self and bringing my animation into a physical realm through printmaking to explore the fluidity of nature and memory, I aim to express a contemporary form of lived Queer experience and connection, whether that be to land or feeling.”