Sax Island

Description:

Sax Island is an imaginary locale nestled somewhere between South America and Africa, a covert meeting point for international criminals. In the eleven-minute video by Hank Bull and Eric Metcalfe, a nonlinear narrative unfolds through a series of fast-paced, comic book-style vignettes, with live actors embodying noir archetypes drawn from pop culture.

The project experiments with the formal possibilities of merging painting and video. Metcalfe crafted over 300 original watercolor drawings for the storyboard, which were then filmed and enhanced with special effects. By blending the real with the imagined, Sax Island builds on personal mythologies while drawing from a broad spectrum of mass-media imagery.

The film features performances by Elizabeth Chitty, Molly Johnson, Andrew James Paterson, Fraser Finlayson, and Berenicci Hershorn, and is scored by Hank Bull and the Canadian Creative Music Collective.

Bull and Metcalfe also published a thirty-two page book to accompany the film that features drawings and photos from the production of Sax Island.

Commissioned by The Music Gallery, Toronto. 

Video documentation is available upon request.