Helpful hands make Helpful Hand

An animated short film by Alex Nagy has been short-listed for a prestigious prize in the first Radcliffe Foundation competition highlighting the plight of global refugees.

The Radcliffe Foundation, in collaboration with the Vancouver International Film Festival, launched the competition to inspire filmmakers across the country to produce a piece that educates, inspires, engages and empowers Canadians to take “tangible action on the crisis.”

The objective was to raise awareness of settlement issues that refugees are facing around the world and motivate Canadians to help.

“Call to Action” entries could be up to a minute long. They were short-listed by a jury including Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, wife of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and advocate for women’s issues, Canadian musician Sarah McLachlan, the Honourable Louise Arbour, former UN High Commisioner for Human Rights and former Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, co-founder of Free the Children Craig Kielburger, executive chair of Thunderbird Films Inc. Ivan Fecan, acclaimed Canadian director Atom Egoyan, Frank Giustra, president of the Radcliffe Foundation and CEO of Fiore Group of Companies, the founder and CEO of Hootsuite Ryan Holmes and Nicolas Moyer, executive director of the Humanitarian Coalition.

Nagy heard about the competition at work.

The Maple Ridge secondary graduate almost didn’t enter due to the time constraints of the contest. He only had a month-and-a-half to go from concept to finished product.

But after bouncing ideas around, the project came together.

“I put something together, showed somebody at work, they were encouraging. So then I asked a whole bunch of people,” said Nagy, who has been working in the industry for nine years.

“This little girl has to be modeled in 3D. So I asked someone who is a modeler and he did her in three days. Then I asked someone who could put bones in her body, because I can’t, and then they helped me. So I asked a bunch of people who were generous. It was about five or six people really helping out,” he explained.

The result of his hard work is called Helpful Hand, the first independent film done by the young animator.

It tells the story of a little girl’s struggle to find a better future for herself. In one scenario, she is lifted onto a waiting jeep and transported to a future that is bright and happy. The other scenario is what happens if she is left behind.

Helpful Hand is a 3D computer generated animated piece.

Nagy uses limited animation for background characters.

“In animation, there’s 24 frames a second, just pictures. So, the little girl was animated every single frame, she’s more fluid,” explained the artist.

Because he didn’t have the time to animate every character in the film, he made an artistic style choice to animate the background characters every fourth, sixth or eighth frame. Meaning that they hold a pose for that length of time before they move into another pose.

“I’m a guy who likes the look of unpolished all the time. I’m not afraid to just show if the idea is there,” Nagy said.

Nagy first got into animation after taking a course at his former high school. Two weeks after graduation, in 2006, he started at the Art Institute of Vancouver, and before the year-and-a-half program was finished he was hired as a junior animator.

Now the Coquitlam resident wants to move on from animating to directing. He plans to do one short film a year, three to five minutes in length, and educational, not just for entertainment.

“I’m not going to do stuff just for slapstick.

“And it’s not going to be heavy-handed, like I want you to learn something, but just through what the characters are feeling on screen as it relates to your own life,” said Nagy, whose next project will tackle the topic of depression, a topic he is passionate about.

Over 120 entries were submitted into the international contest.

Nagy is up against Zeeshan Parwez, a filmmaker and musician originally from Peshawar, Pakistan who now lives in Vancouver, and a team from Toronto, Michèle Hozer and Roxana Spicer, both previous Canadian Screen Award winners. Hozer has also had two films on the Oscar shortlist and been nominated for an Emmy.

The three finalists have now been put to a public vote. The winner will be decided through social media and will receive a $20,000 prize and a screening at the Vancouver International Film Festival.