The 2013 Award for Best Canadian First Feature Film goes to: ASPHALT WATCHES

Asphalt Watches wins the 2013 Award for Best Canadian First Feature Film and we at Vanguard couldn't be happier. Congratulations to Seth Scriver and Shayne Ehman!

ASPHALT WATCHES Premieres Tonight!

Shayne Ehman and Seth Scriver's Asphalt Watches premieres tonight at Scotiabank Theatre 8 at 9:45 PM. Head over to our previous post to see the trailer.

Tickets can be purchased:

• ONLINE: TIFF.net/thefestival
• BY PHONE: 416.599.TIFF or 1.888.599.8433 (Toll-free) 
• IN PERSON
• Festival Box Office; 225 King St. West
• Bloor Hot Docs Cinema Box Office; 506 Bloor Street West

Further information about Shayne Ehman and Seth Scriver's Asphalt Watches can be found on the Festival website, as well as on the Asphalt Watches Facebook page, Indiegogo page and IMDB page.

ASPHALT WATCHES screening times:

• Tuesday, Sept 10th, 9:45 PM SCOTIABANK 8
• Thursday, Sept 12th, 8:45 PM SCOTIABANK 13
• Friday, Sept 13th, 2:15 PM SCOTIABANK 4

5 Questions for the ASPHALT WATCHES Directors

You've watched the trailer, and learnt all you could ever want to know about Asphalt Watches directors Shayne Ehman and Seth Scriver in our Director Profile. Now we really get into their minds with our latest instalment of "5 Questions". Siân had an opportunity to ask the guys about their inspiration, boiled hot dogs, and even got to say "beaver". (Yes, that kind of beaver.)



SM: I absolutely loved this story telling format; I think the animation and music really played to the bizarre characters you met whilst on the road. What was your inspiration for telling these stories through a feature-length animation? 

SS: Well, we wanted to tell this story after we reached Toronto and actually even on the way we were making drawings of people and situations which is what we do anyways. We had watched 20 seconds of a Gary Panter animation right before leaving Vancouver so after having this bizarre near death mystical adventure we made a plan to make an animation of it. Originally it was going to be a Double feature, but we boiled it down a bit.

SE: Animation is a choice storytelling medium because the story is entirely suspended in art. Everything in the animation is carefully placed.

SM: Skeleton Hat and Bucktooth Cloud are meant to be this world's versions of yourselves. Was there any sort of special process by which you came to these characters? Or did a weird transparent, floating blobber just seem cool? (Because it is--and the top hat is a nice touch.) 

SE: I used to wear a crumpled up top hat quite a bit back in the late 90's when I started drawing the Bucktooth Cloud, adding buggy eyes and buckteeth to blobs in Vancouver. I guess it's just a way to meet the world half way. Bucktooth is like my spirit animal who I can see when i stare into old blank paper.

SS: When we first met, in Halifax in 1999, we actually bonded over a mutual fondness for graffiti cover up blobs. Skeleton Hat evolved from a hat I wore that said fred the dog and turned into fried the dog which eventually led to a fried hat with only the skeleton of it left.

SM: The music! The music. I will forever refer to boiled hot dogs as BHDs and probably won't be able to look at a Boston Pizza the same way ever again. How did you come about adding these little songs to the film? 

SE: In Chilliwack, B.C. we were waiting for a ride at the Seven Eleven. Two ladies approached, tied up their dog with an extension cord and went into the store...

SS: They made multiple trips in and out and used us a shield to stash their piles of stolen hot dogs.

SE: Eventually, they invited us over for 'Boiled Hot Dogs' and also to play a 'Wayne Gretzky' video game. A 'Boston Pizza' is west coast slang... means 'backpack".

SM: Okay, okay: so that truck driver--did all of those radio handles really come from him or did you make some up yourselves? 

SS: All of the radio handles are real handles, but not all of them came from him.

SE: Some of them are our friends nicknames or email handles... Undead Hillbilly, White Pumpkin, El Destructo, Belly Boy, EZ Rock, Krumple Stiltskin, Barefoot Immortal, Crappy Bluebeard, Ferrero Rocher, Smooty, Skurgy, Couch Money, Fry Dog, Headless Spectre.... Theres actually quite a few times when, in the periphery of the story, we say hello to our friends using cryptic details.

SM: If you each had to pick your own favourite character you met whilst on this trip, who would it be? (Mine might be that truck driver, just for all of the times he said "beaver".)

SS: Favourite I dunno but I kept thinking about Santa for years and still do every once in a while wondering if he's gonna show up and go nuts on me, also there's a lot of fat white guys with beards wearing sweat pants around so I often think i see him. yeah maybe he's my favourite, most intense for sure. I really get a kick outta thinking back on Gengrenous too. Sponge Face and Rat Fingers are very sweet to think back on also.

SE: Definitely Santa. I learned a lot about Santa Claus that day... Rat Fingers is indeed another favourite because I ended up meeting him again years after the hitchhiking journey and he has been a major inspiration and major influence on my life... Teaching my girlfriend Zeddy and I about wild foods, mushrooms and earth stewardship... He is an amazing man named Louis Lesosky, a raging grandfather who still lives in that van!

SM: And lastly (yes, I know this is six questions but can't stop, won't stop!), do you have any other feature-film projects on the horizon? Or just, what is next for you fellas? 

SE: We became obsessed with 'Ed's Pile' while making this movie...

SS: Ed's Pile

SE: Ed's Pile is on the horizon.... true story


ASPHALT WATCHES Screening Times:

• Tuesday, Sept 10th, 9:45 PM SCOTIABANK 8
• Thursday, Sept 12th, 8:45 PM SCOTIABANK 13
• Friday, Sept 13th, 2:15 PM SCOTIABANK 4

ASPHALT WATCHES: Five Road Movies

In Seth Scriver and Shayne Ehman's Asphalt Watches, two dudes--Skeleton Hat and Bucktooth Cloud--decide to hitchhike across the Trans-Canada Highway (although technically, Bucktooth Cloud is a blob, not a dude). Like all good road movies, Asphalt Watches makes sure viewers know that the journey is usually more important than the destination. Unlike other road movies, the entirety of Asphalt Watches is Flash animation, but it's not a kids' cartoon. It's part of The Toronto International Film Festival's Vanguard Programme this year, too.

Here are five other road movies that are a bit off the beaten path (get it?).

1. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert 

Road trips usually mean dirty gas stations, questionable hotels, and bad food. Not that Stephan Elliott's 1994 film doesn't have those things, but since the main characters are all drag queens, it's way more glamorous than most other road movies. Tick (Hugo Weaving), Bernadette (Terence Stamp), and Adam (Guy Pearce) set out for a small town in the middle of Nowheresville, Australia to perform at a hotel casino resort. Along the way, the trio encounters hijinks, heartbreak, and eventually, happiness.

2. The Rambler

Calvin Lee Reeder wrote and directed this surrealistic road trip movie that follows the real and possibly imagined adventures of the nameless title character, played by Dermot Mulroney. Although its narrative is anything but straightforward, in a lot of ways The Rambler feels more realistic than other road movies. After all, being on the road for days at a time, can make you see all kinds of crazy things. Like a scientist who can record dreams on VHS tape or women who might be your girlfriend might be real, or merely a figment of your imagination.

3. Prometheus

Not every road movie has to take place on an actual road. Like Doc Brown says at the end of Back To The Future, "Where we're going, we don't need roads." Prometheus is set in the future, but before the events of Ridley Scott's Alien movie. It also has a lot of the same touchstones: scientists travel deep into space to search for answers to questions that perhaps they shouldn't be asking. Let's not forget multinational corporations and hidden agendas! The end of Prometheus pointed towards a sequel where the surviving scientist, Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) would embark on another road movie with an android's head as her companion (Michael Fassbender). This is possibly a first for any road movie.

4. The Road  

This utterly bleak tale of a post-apocalyptic society is such a road movie that it actually has the word "road" in the title. Viggo Mortenson and Kodi Smit-McPhee play an unnamed father and son who aren't so much in search of a final destination as they are trying just to survive. It's based on a Cormac McCarthy novel, so "grim" is probably an understatement, but you should know that things get much, much darker in the film before any light shines through.

5. The Lord of the Rings trilogy

Peter Jackson's epic trilogy is possibly the ultimate road movie because it's actually several road movies in one. The nine members of the Fellowship of the Ring are split apart by choice and necessity, resulting in a series of parallel narratives involving traveling to various destinations. And for most of the movies' nine-hour plus running time, Frodo and Sam literally walk on roads without shoes! (Hobbits have sturdy feet, but still, that's hardcore. At least Viggo Mortenson had makeshift shoes in The Road.) The Lord of the Rings trilogy might be the only road movie in which there are no cars, trucks, bicycles, motorcycles, or spacecraft. Instead, there are horses, carts, boats, ships, eagles, and of course, the Fell Beasts the Nazgûl ride.

After a this list of wildly diverse road movies, you should be prepared for the insane adventures found within Asphalt Watches, screening at TheToronto International Film Festival's Vanguard Programme.

ASPHALT WATCHES Screening Times:

Tuesday, Sept 10th, 9:45 PM SCOTIABANK 8

Thursday, Sept 12th, 8:45 PM SCOTIABANK 13

Friday, Sept 13th, 2:15 PM SCOTIABANK 4

Director Profile: ASPHALT WATCHES' Shayne Ehman and Seth Scriver

Shayne Ehman, Asphalt Watches (mixed media)

Shayne Ehman and Seth Scriver have had impressive enough careers as artists, with their illustrated works appearing in galleries and exhibitions around the world. Maybe you've even been lucky enough to catch Ehman's large-scale installations at the Vancouver Zoo, or scored a copy of Scriver's book, Stooge Pile. If not, don't fret, because experiencing Asphalt Watches at this year's Festival will be like nothing you've ever experienced before. 

In 2000, Ehman and Scriver hitchhiked across Canada, starting in Chilliwack, BC (home of Chillwack), and making stops in Agassiz (not the home of Ándre), Calgary, and Regina. As you can expect from hitchhiking across Canada, they met some interesting characters. And by "interesting characters", we mean the wait-did-this-actually-happen-that-is-totally-crazy sort of characters. Not content with telling their story through static illustrations--or verbally, or through slam poetry, Ehman and Scriver set out to create a feature-length animated film of their adventure. 

Seth Scriver, Fatty Negative (airbrush, ink, paint)

The project took seven years, starting in 2006 and finishing up this past year. During most of this time, Ehman and Scriver lived at opposite ends of the country and could only work on Asphalt Watches sporadically, whenever they happened to be together. As Scriver described on their Indiegogo campaign, their "work is intensively collaborative, so it [was] important [they were] physically in the same space".

It was worth the wait, because Asphalt Watches takes the road-trip genre and flips it on its head, all the while singing bizarrely catchy songs about boiled hot dogs and Boston Pizza. (Seriously.) And it's all true. Each of the people they encountered on their journey have been re-imagined as bizarre characters, with Ehman and Scriver playing the parts of Bucktooth Cloud and Skeleton Hat, respectively. 

Shayne Ehman, Zen Capacity

Ehman and Shriver have a knack for storytelling (and illustrating, but, come on--that goes without saying) and we can only hope they continue to bring us along on their adventures. 

You can view more of Shayne Ehman's work here, and Seth Scriver's work here. 

ASPHALT WATCHES Screening Times:

• Tuesday, Sept 10th, 9:45 PM SCOTIABANK 8
• Thursday, Sept 12th, 8:45 PM SCOTIABANK 13
• Friday, Sept 13th, 2:15 PM SCOTIABANK 4

ASPHALT WATCHES Trailer

Based (loosely we assume) on the true cross-Canada hitchhiking road trip by directors Shayne Ehman and Seth Scriver, Asphalt Watches' hand-drawn flash animated film transforms real people and places into surreal abstractions that depict the essence of their trip.

Below is the trailer for Asphalt Watches, which plays this year's Toronto International Film Festival within the Vanguard programme.

Further information about Shayne Ehman and Seth Scriver's Asphalt Watches can be found on the Festival website, as well as on the Asphalt Watches Facebook page, Indiegogo page and IMDB page.

ASPHALT WATCHES screening times:

• Tuesday, Sept 10th, 9:45 PM SCOTIABANK 8
• Thursday, Sept 12th, 8:45 PM SCOTIABANK 13
• Friday, Sept 13th, 2:15 PM SCOTIABANK 4