8 Rooms

8 Rooms is an animated short film by Anita Lebeau that explores the mysterious nature of dreams, as a woman and her sidekick cat find themselves moving from one strange room to another in pursuit of an elusive floating pushpin. On this journey between dreams and reality, the characters meet with the unexpected, the absurd, and the oddly familiar.

8 Rooms is an exhibition that highlights the eight dioramas that were created for Anita Lebeau’s 11-minute animated film 8 Rooms. For this project, Lebeau enlisted seven other artists to contribute dioramas to be used as backgrounds in her film. These real-world spaces were professionally lit, filmed and photographed, and the images were imported into animation software. Lebeau uses an animation technique called rigging – creating characters as puppets within the software. Including real-world elements within an animated film is a hallmark of Lebeau’s work. The dioramas were created by the 8 Rooms artists, a collective from rural Southwestern Manitoba and Winnipeg: Heather Komus, Reva Stone, Suzie Smith, Barb Flemington, Shirley Brown, Seema Goel, Diana Thorneycroft and Anita Lebeau.