Spotlight: Behind-the-Scenes Panel with Sunburnt Unicorn Team

This free event is open to CIFF Industry Pass holders and Sunburnt Unicorn Ticket holders. RSVP to communications@auarts.ca to attend.

After working as a comic book artist for over 20 years, Calgarian Nick Johnson set out to make his first feature film, bringing together a team that included fellow alumni from the Alberta University of the Arts to create Sunburnt Unicorn, a surreal journey of wonder and terror inspired by the family adventure films of the 1980s.

Join us for a behind-the-scenes panel discussion with the director and animation team of Sunburnt Unicorn in advance of the film’s Calgary premiere at the Calgary International Film Festival (screenings are Tuesday, Sept. 24 and Saturday, Sept. 28).

Learn about the production process of making an independent animated film in Alberta. Writer, director and producer, Nick Johnson, (AUArts Assistant Professor and BDes ‘13, Visual Communications Illustration) will be joined by Sunburnt Unicorn animators and AUArts alumni Sho Uehara (BDes ‘10, Illustration), Isabelle Ackroyd (BDes ‘20, Illustration) and Natasha Jensen (BFA ‘13, Drawing) who will share their experiences and inspirations as working artists in a thriving industry.

Meet the Animators

Nick Johnson graduated from AUArts in 2013 with a Bachelor of Design and received his Master of Design in Comics and Graphic Novels from the University of Dundee in 2020. He has worked in animation as an art director and storyboard artist since 2015, and most recently as the writer, director and producer of the animated feature film Sunburnt Unicorn. He teaches Character Design and Illustration as an Assistant Professor at the Alberta University of the Arts and finds inspiration in Can Lit, horror fiction, X-Men, Proust, and the ghosts of Utopia.

Isabelle Ackroyd is a story artist based in Vancouver, Canada. She graduated from the Character Design stream at AUArts in 2020 with a minor in Animation. Isabelle has worked on several past productions with Squid Brain Studios and is currently working on a feature film with New Machine Studios as an Art Director and Storyboard Artist.

Natasha Faye Jensen is an interdisciplinary artist from Moh’kins’tsis/Calgary, Treaty 7 territory in the Southern Alberta region, Canada. Jensen completed her BFA at Alberta University of the Arts (formerly Alberta College of Art and Design) in 2013 and completed a MA in Contemporary Art Practice at the Edinburgh College of Art in 2020. Natasha has exhibited in exhibitions, galleries, and festivals in Canada, the United States, Finland and the United Kingdom.

Sho Uehara is a cartoonist and freelance illustrator based in Calgary AB, Canada. Sho graduated from AUArts in 2010 with a BDes in Illustration. Sho is the author of the independent comic book REPOSE and the short story GRIM for The "Wishless" Anthology. Sho makes work for comics, picture books, storyboards and character design and has created illustrative work for BOOM! Studios, Swerve Magazine and Inhabit Media Press.