At The Quinte Hotel is based on a reading by poet Al Purdy, it is a dizzying mixed-media gem that explores masculinity and the clash between high and low culture. All At The Quinte Hotel images © 2005 Bruce Alcock.

At The Quinte Hotel by Vancouver animator, Bruce Alcock, is one of my fave short films from the 2005 festival crop. Based on a reading by Canadian poet Al Purdy, At The Quinte Hotel is a dizzying mixed-media gem that uses a sundry of techniques to explore the repressive and contradictory shortcomings of masculinity, along with the clash between so-called high (beer, flowers, beauty) and low (bars, beer, fistfights) culture.

Bruce Alcock was born in Corner Brook, Newfoundland, a small paper mill town of about 24,000 people. Alcock’s animation roots date back to grade five when his friend Nick’s mother came to his class to teach art. “One of her lessons,” remembers Alcock, “involved bleaching film, then drawing on it with permanent markers and projecting the result.” Inspired by the film and their mutual love of drawing, the two friends started a small film club with a few other friends. “[We] made tons of animated stuff,” says Alcock, “pixilation, clay, cutout (including a grade 11 physics film), mostly about fighting and destruction by fire.”

Alcock also spend considerable time at the local National Film Board of Canada office watching many of the studio’s acclaimed animation films. “We were starved for material, and watched pretty much the whole library of animation,” notes Alcock. “McLaren was the big favorite, but other highlights included Sand Castle (by Co Hoedeman), Spinnolio (by John Weldon), The Sweater (by Sheldon Cohen), and Kaj Pindal's stuff. It blows me away that we could watch all that material on film, for free.”

Alcock chose At The Quinte Hotel “because it's a poem about poetry in an unusual context, because it's visceral and casual, because it's patently Canadian.”

After high school Alcock studied tuba at the University of Toronto. He then moved to Paris to learn French, did a comparative literature degree at the University of Toronto, then moved to Barcelona and taught English. In Barcelona, Alcock met an animator named Dirk van de Vondel. “We both went to a life drawing club. He needed help on a spot, then a short, and then a couple more spots. I ended up apprenticing with him: started out artworking, then in-betweening, then animating. The work was very physical — charcoal, pastel, paint — and the drawings were extremely loose and textural. Really inspiring, fine art looking work. Perhaps the best learning aid was the fact that he had no shooting or previewing equipment at all. For months, I watched all movement a few frames at a time by flipping paper, trying to imagine how it would all work on film. He'd send the stuff away to be shot as we finished each job, but I saw nothing until about nine months after we'd started working together. At that point, all my previsualisations coalesced at once. Very exciting moment.

Alcock returned to Toronto in 1990 and, briefly, attended Sheridan College. “I hated it. Animation history seemed to be limited to American commercial studio work.” After his short stay at Sheridan, Alcock, along with partner Adam Shaheen, formed the — now acclaimed — animation studio called Cuppa Coffee animation in 1991.