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NDG Off The Wall / Hors Les Murs – Silver Audience Award!

NDG Off The Wall / Hors Les Murs is an annual outdoor screening of short films with a connection to the Montreal neighbourhood of NDG. Founded and run by local filmmaker John Mackay, it’s a wonderful way to celebrate local creativity in action. For the August 2019 edition, John very kindly invited us to screen a 10-minute excerpt from Les Enseignistes, and I’m delighted to say it won a silver audience award! We donated the prize money back to Off The Wall and wish John all the best for next year’s screening.

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First screenings

Now the film is done and dusted, I’ve already had some exciting opportunities to show it to interested audiences. (Technically the premiere was at the ATypI conference at the Université de Québec à Montréal in September 2017, but since then I’ve added about 25% more content and all the wonderful intertitles/previews by Luke Norrad, plus some refinements to the Korsakow editing.)
The complete version was shown in my own department (Communication Studies, Concordia University) in September 2018 to an invited audience including cast, crew, students, and colleagues. The same month I took it to the annual national signmakers’ tradeshow in Toronto, courtesy of an invitation from the Sign Association of Canada / Association Canadienne de l’Enseigne. In October 2018 we showed some clips to high schoolers attending the Sign Manufacturers Day hosted by Montreal Neon in Laval.
In November 2018 I’ll be taking the film to the Lost River Film Festival in sunny San Marcos, TX, where it’s an official selection.
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Almost done! / En cours de finalisation

Les Enseignistes de Montréal aka The Signmakers of Montreal is almost complete, after two years of careful planning and production. The film will be entered in several festivals and eventually released for free, in full, on this website.

Après deux ans de planification minutieuse et de production inventive, le documentaire Les Enseignistes de Montréal (« The Signmakers of Montreal » en version anglaise) est pour ainsi dire terminé. Présenté dans le cadre de plusieurs festivals, il sera par la suite diffusé gratuitement sur le présent site Web.

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Lettering and signs – Lettrage et enseignes

Alongside the current resurgence of interest in neon, Montreal is also able to support a number of talented young letterers and signpainters. Among them is Luke Norrad, a NSCAD University graduate whose work is historically mindful, while also being lively and playful. We invited Luke to view each video segment, pull out a line or two of conversation, and create his own graphical interpretations. These eye-catching graphics convey some of the inventiveness and energy of the everyday signpainting one might see in a grocery or record store, while also working as enticing previews for viewers of the film.

Parallèlement au regain d’intérêt que connaît actuellement le néon, de jeunes et talentueux lettreurs et peintres d’enseignes mènent des carrières florissantes à Montréal. En fait partie Luke Norrad, diplômé du Collège d’art et de design de la Nouvelle-Écosse. Soucieux de la tradition, son travail n’en demeure pas moins dynamique et ludique. Nous avons invité M. Norrad à visionner des segments vidéo du documentaire, à en extraire une ou deux répliques et à en tirer des interprétations graphiques personnelles. Des plus accrocheuses, ces images traduisent bien l’inventivité et l’énergie qui se dégagent d’enseignes peintes visibles au quotidien dans les magasins d’alimentation ou chez les disquaires. De plus, ils composent une bande-annonce des plus attrayantes pour les spectateurs.