A filmmaker with fond memories of Errington has had his latest work recognized at the Athens ANIMFEST film festival, a significant accomplishment for an animation created for his master's degree in psychology.
Bjorn Stickle is a Canadian-U.S. citizen who currently lives in New York, but his family's roots in the mid-Island area go deep. His grandparents built their home with trees they cut down in the woods decades ago.
“I love Errington and the area just because my family has been on the same property for 60 years now,” said Stickle, who remembers going hiking at Englishman River Falls, riding horses at a ranch and visiting Goats on the Roof with his grandparents.
"I would just stay with my grandparents for a couple weeks at a time. We would go camping together throughout the Island," he added.
His latest documentary project is called Unease and is an animated short that looks at anxiety and ways to treat it in adults.
“This is an experimental animated short in two senses. It’s a combination of science and art that we’re trying to use in an educational setting,” said Stickle, who studied 3D character animation in B.C. before moving to the U.S.
Unease explores how animation can be used to educate the public about Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and differentiate it from situational anxiety, and is backed by an Institutional Review Board-approved psychological study, which Stickle is the lead researcher for at Pace University.
His findings show that the animation improves diagnostic accuracy among healthcare workers and meaningfully shifts public attitudes about mental health across racial and generational lines. He will wrap up his studies in December when he defends his thesis.
“I’m specializing in using animation as a tool to gauge biases in education in adults,” Stickle added. “This is the first short that we’ve done for this. It is the test template for what we’re doing for my thesis that we’re currently doing right now.”
The animation was a collaboration with Vancouver-based animator Joshua Jinadu, who has worked with Stickle for several years and was the main editor of his documentary criss-crossing North America called 14,000 Miles.
Stickle said he learned during animation school that he's better suited to directing and story boarding an animation project — guiding the process rather than completing the animation itself.
In March he entered the film into the student category of the Athens ANIMFEST and travelled to Greece for several days, including a "once in a lifetime" trip to the Parthenon.
“I spent several days in Athens to see the city, meet the people and have great food and see all these different animations that are done by peers from around the world in different languages," Stickle said. “We didn’t win and that’s okay because we’re really proud of what we’ve done with the three months that we had.”
The short film will serve as a template for a series Stickle hopes to continue, with his next animation project focused on oppositional defiance disorder. This time he will have six months to finish and aims to improve the quality of the animation.
He also plans to keep submitting work to film festivals and in the next few years hopes to have three shorts entered at festivals. Unease was recently won praise from the New York Short Animation Festival as "a beautifully crafted short that bridges the gap between science and storytelling, leaving viewers both informed and emotionally moved."
Stickle's advice for young people looking to follow a similar path is to avoid focusing on just one area of life and get experience outside an academic setting.
Since the animation is part of a research study, he said it cannot be openly published online for the time being, and is only approved to play for festival audiences in a non-research setting. Stickle said he will most likely stop collecting data around late April.
