Cattle Call

Cattle-Call

Quick stats about the movie

Structured around the mesmerizing talents of 2007 Man-Sask auctioneering champion, Tim Dowler, Cattle Call uses a hallucinogenic barrage of stop-motion and avant-garde animation techniques to create a film that looks the way auctioneering sounds.

Produced with a grant awarded by bravoFACT (Foundation to Assist Canadian Talent), a division of Bell Media Inc.

Creative team

Writer/director: Matthew Rankin & Mike Maryniuk
Producer: Matthew Rankin

Filmmaker’s statement

Matthew Rankin says:

“Early in the making of Cattle Call, Mike Maryniuk and I decided that the best way for slow-talkers like us to get into the hyper-speed psychic wavelength of auctioneering was to consume massive amounts of caffeine.

At first, we started our brainstorming sessions by drinking medium-sized ‘Two-by-Fours’ down at the Tim Horton’s, which is two creams and four sugars. These soon mutated in to extra-large ‘Wayne Gretzkies’ (nine creams, nine sugars) with several shots of Redbull each and before long the manager of Tim Horton’s ordered his staff not to serve us anymore.

Mike and I would be literally tripping over each others’ words, yammering out rapid-fire consonants with the same panic-paced iambic pentameter as Tim Dowler himself.

Every image in Cattle Call was dreamed up during these delirious caffeine benders and Mike and I think it’s a great method for making movies about auctioneering guys. Be sure to sign up for Mike’s step-by-step, sure-to-deliver-results Film Training Manitoba workshop, ‘How to Get into Sundance by Giving Yourself Diabetes.’

About Mike Maryniuk

Mike-Maryniuk

Mike Maryniuk was born in Winnipeg but raised in the rural back country of Manitoba.

A completely self-taught film virtuoso, Maryniuk’s film world is an inventive hybrid of Jim Henson, Norman McLaren and Stan Brakhage.

Maryniuk’s films are a visual stew of hand-made ingredients and are full of home cooked wonderfulness.

About Matthew Rankin

Matthew-Rankin

Matthew Rankin was born in Winnipeg. He studied history at McGill and Université Laval, and then filmmaking down in the sub-human trench of Winnipeg’s artistic underclass: a true filmmaking utopia where he directed more than 20 shorts. A committed Esperantist, Rankin presently resides on Elephant Island, Antarctica, where he is hard at work on his new film, Mynarski: Death Plummet 1944.

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