As the community debates the Champlain Monument, local youth are taking a lighter approach to the statue of the French explorer.
For the past couple of months, some of the visitors to the Orillia Youth Centre have been working with the Otter Art Club, run out of Studio in the Peter Street Arts District, to create a short stop-motion animated film.
“We like the lighter side of it, but it’s history. It did happen,” Travis Shilling, who runs the club with his partner, Naomi Woodman, said of the arrival of Samuel de Champlain to the area in 1615. “We’re trying to show something that happened, but as a fantasy.”
Allowing the young artists to embrace their creativity “suddenly makes it a mystery,” he said.
Now that the statue is gone — though it is set to return to Couchiching Beach Park — the youth were asked to consider where Champlain went.
“Maybe he woke up and walked off,” Shilling said.
And, where are the Indigenous people who were depicted on the monument?
“Maybe they’re out in Lake Couchiching, teaching Champlain how to fish,” Shilling mused.
That type of thought process allows politics to be pushed aside. Still, they did discuss the history and the controversy in an effort to get everyone on the same page.
“It’s complicated enough doing stop motion, so let’s all agree on how we feel about it,” Shilling said.
Shilling and Woodman see their roles in the project to be aides to the kids. They’re providing the space, material and instruction, but the kids are plotting the direction of the film.
“It’s their vision. It’s not ours,” Shilling said.
As that vision becomes reality, the excitement is obvious.
“Some of them didn’t even know they could do these things,” said Shilling, who has experience with claymation, film and television.
The three-minute film, narrated by a seagull, is called The Lake of Many Winds. It is in the filming stage, and Shilling expects it to be finished in the next two weeks or so. He plans to hold a screening at his studio.