The tools change constantly. The graphic language doesn’t. That’s Nicolas Ménard, a Québécois animation director, artist and designer who moves between hand-drawn animation, stop motion and custom code without ever losing the clean, unmistakable look that runs through all of it.
A graduate of the Royal College of Art in London, he won the Jury Award for Best Animated Short at SXSW with Wednesday with Goddard and landed a place in the Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors’ Showcase at Cannes. Grand Prix awards at Uppsala, Encounters and Animafest Cyprus followed, along with clients including MoMA, the National Film Board of Canada, The New York Times, MTV, Ray-Ban, Facebook and Google. In 2024 he co-founded the film, art and design studio Eastend Western. He also teaches, having lectured at CalArts, Goldsmiths, Kingston, Hyper Island and UQAM.
At Kinomural he’s showing Colorimetry in Motion, an experimental film built with custom software. Colorimetric data and a few simple mathematical rules generate colours that are graphically represented and layered on top of each other. Interpolating from one randomly chosen colour to the next produces the movement. No animator involved, strictly speaking. Just numbers, doing something beautiful.
