Giant Bear / Nanurluk

Giant Bear is a ten-minute animated short based on a traditional Inuit story. A hunter alone on the ice faces an impossibly large polar bear. The animation by Daniel Gies and E.D. Films is painterly and visceral, and the sound had to match that raw, elemental power.

Dan and I sat together many days and dreamed up what an arctic landscape sounds like when the mythologies blend into the real. We worked on all foley elements together in the studio. Some of the best memories of making this film are from running around the parking lot recording layers of heavy breathing and growls, then processing them to sound like a hundred-foot polar bear.

Having previously worked on Beatrice Deer's music, I asked if she would help me with this score. In our time together working on Giant Bear, she taught me types of songs from the north that carried exactly what the characters were feeling: hunger, loneliness, pain, exaltation. Her voice knew how to tell this story.

The musicians from her band were invited to collaborate, resulting in a series of experiments tuning wind recordings to chords that would support the score and weave sound design and music into a single living composition.

The film won the Canadian Screen Award for Best Animated Short in 2020, screened at over twenty international festivals including the world's premiere animation festival Annecy, Hiroshima, and Ottawa, and earned the Fantasia Film Festival Special Jury Mention.