Dennis Jackson

"Since the days I was in elementary school watching 16 mm prints of the National Film Board animation on aboriginal creation tales, I’ve been fascinated. At the time I had really felt that my culture had somehow been accepted which gave me a sense of pride. I remember sitting at the back of the class with the projector as the teacher showed me the individual frames with the native characters on them. After this I had written only stories about my northern community of Sandy Bay for English assignments and essays with the help of my mother and grandparents with which I excelled in. Later my parents had purchased a Super 8 movie camera for holidays that I had put to use and experimented with in the basement. I had animated my cat, my bike, my sister or my friends, anything that moved I shot to see what it looked like. When these ideas were exhausted I animated figures I had made from plastercine emulating Star Wars creatures and scenes.I continued to write stories after high school drawing inspiration from my moshum (grandpa) who hunted and trapped for his twenty-two children about whom he would tell tales, some were tall while others were true. It has been twelve years since he passed away and I continue to envision him trapping in the north as evident in “Journey Through Fear”. With my degree in Film and Video production at the University of Regina, I hope to continue these stories through animation as I believe they are significant to an ever-changing world in which the children can inspire change as I have learned from my own kids."