The Complete Works of Jamie Travis (Canada, TRT 73 minutes)

Why the Anderson Children Didn’t Come to Dinner (2003, 17 minutes)
The Saddest Boy in the World (2006, 14 minutes)
Patterns (2005, 9 minutes)
Patterns 2 (2006, 14 minutes)
Patterns 3 (2006, 19 minutes)

So far the works of Vancouver filmmaker Jamie Travis have been striking demonstrations of calculated design and rigorous production method. If you happened to catch his 2003 short Why the Anderson Children Didn’t Come to Dinner, you know it’s something of a mini-masterpiece—an oddball comedy guided by an unusually talented
and precise vision. In fact, Film Threat called it “the kind of film Tim Burton wishes he could make.”

With that kind of praise, you’d think the young director would stay fixed in his technique. Wanting to prove he could make a film in days rather than months, the director switched gears and made Patterns, a quick and dirty digital short that combines Svankmajerian surrealism with elements of Japanese horror. True to form, the film is winning raves. Last month, it netted Travis a best director prize at the Vancouver International Film Festival. “Patterns started out as a collection of my obsessions,” says Travis. “Patterned wallpaper, unattended appliances, mysterious callers, nonsensical dreams, drains and pipes – all of these things. But the line between my earthly obsessions and my filmmaker infatuations was so fuzzy that the movie morphed into a messy pastiche.”

“In terms of the kinds if films I am interested in, I lean toward the self-conscious—those movies that make salient their storytelling but engage an audience all the same. Nothing recently has quite attached itself to my loins as has Roy Anderson’s Songs from the Second Floor. My person, I believe, was formed by The Parent Trap and Annie. And I still think Napoleon Dynamite was underrated. I am open to all kinds of filmmaking. I want to see it all.” - ION Magazine