Skin for Skin is a dark allegory of greed and spiritual reckoning set during the early days of the fur trade.

In 1823, the Governor of the largest fur-trading company in the world travels across his Dominion, extracting ever-greater riches from the winter bounty of animal furs. In his brutal world of profit and loss, animals are slaughtered to the brink of extinction until the balance of power shifts, and the forces of nature exact their own terrible price.

With nods to Melville and Coleridge, directors Carol Beecher & Kevin Kurytnik have created a visually stunning contemporary myth about the cost of arrogance and greed.

Skin for Skin takes any clichés of boring Canadian history and turns them upside down—what made you choose this particular character and this particular time period, 1823, as the setting for the story? 

This time period was the height of power of the Hudson’s Bay Company, one of the oldest companies in the world. The history of the HBC is very much the history of Canada and the fact that the founding of our nation was based mostly on the company’s interests. The man in charge during this time was Governor George Simpson, often referred to as “The Emperor of the North.” He was the de facto ruler of all land claimed by HBC for the British King. He was cunning, tough, and a survivor, described as a “bastard by birth and persuasion,” controlling the company with an iron fist and generating massive amounts of profit. At this time the company would process over half a million beaver pelts per year, as well as thousands of other fur-bearing animals and birds of all types.

There was also the connection to the voyageurs and the canoe, which was fascinating to us. If it wasn’t for them, the company’s reach wouldn’t have been as vast. These guys were unbelievably strong. They were the engines of the fur trade, and were predominantly French, First Nations, and Métis. We wanted to present some of that history and culture as well, almost as an ambient presence to the story of our Governor. They would take Governor Simpson from Montreal all the way to the Pacific Ocean in one spring/summer season, called the Spring Brigade. That’s an incredible feat. Travelling across country by canoe opened us up to exploring the landscape, which has had a great influence shaping our story, and we were really interested in the psycho-geography, the non-literal spiritual geography of Canada.

As we were researching the history, and with an eye to our interests in myth and fantasy, we found that aspects of Simpson’s governorship, in particular the annual Spring Brigade, had parallels to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and the environmental lessons to be learned. The poem is about a mariner whose ship is led out of a raging storm by an albatross, which he then kills for no reason. All hell breaks loose and his world is torn apart. Forces of nature take him on a supernatural journey to understand the importance of the environment and that it should be respected. He then goes on to tell of this lesson to others.

With Skin for Skin, you pulled together mythologies from many different cultures to help create a dark fantasy vision that brings history alive. Could you tell us about your underlying inspiration?

 We wanted to create a contemporary Canadian myth that went further than events and names and dates and numbers, something of an environmental myth that told a deeper truth about our country by highlighting the power of the natural world. Nature takes the most powerful man of the time on a journey of salvation and has him make a choice to either live in some sort of balance with the world or perish.

We got our visual and story inspiration from mythologies from all over the world, discovering many similarities in symbolism, legends, and stories of magic and shamans. Interestingly, the raven figures prominently in Nordic myths, Celtic myths from Scotland where our Governor is from, and of course in many myths of the First Nations of North America.

We designed this myth to have nine distinct parts, based on aspects of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, and on Jungian archetypes: Hunt, Work, Storm, Ice, Journey, Demolition, Reconstruction, Decision, and the Circle. The transition between each part involves a metamorphosis of sorts, and we tried to keep the rhythm of the film so that it would flow like a river. It has a psycho-geography—a metaphysical, mysterious supernatural as opposed to natural Canada—borrowing more than a little of the intent of Alan Moore’s dark, occult London in his graphic novel masterpiece From Hell.

The overall structure of the supernatural journey is primarily from Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” our Raven being Coleridge’s albatross. In trying to give the Governor reason for obsessing/hating/fearing the Raven, we also channelled more than a little of Moby Dick into the story. But we must have done this unconsciously, because we only realized this upon finishing when it was pointed out to us at a workprint screening.

This myth is primarily Scottish Celtic, but it does include the Raven as Trickster, the agent of change. Everything in the film happens in the Governor’s subconscious as he is given the choice of finding balance with nature or ending. The canoe is designed with Celtic motifs, the Celtic triad and the horned hunting god Cernunnos headboard. There are also aspects of dream logic, and the ending can have multiple meanings.

The title Skin for Skin comes from a conversation between God and Satan in the Book of Job: “And Satan answered the Lord, and said, Skin for skin, yea, all that a man has will he give for his life.” No one knows what the hell this means.

But more pertinently for this project, the quote was repurposed by the HBC for their official crest as Pro Pelle Cutem, Latin for “A Skin for a Skin.” And their take on it is related to the human skin working to harvest the animal skin. The crest is still in use on merchandise and promotional materials of HBC stores.

You are both avid cinephiles. Could you tell us a little about the influences on this film and how you created the incredibly cinematic action sequences? 

 We are serious fans of all kinds of cinema, and voraciously study visual storytelling. We drew upon the work of many filmmakers, especially the visual literacy of Kubrick and Spielberg. The precision of our design is very much taken from Kubrick’s approach to visual precision, camera work, lenses, and editing, and from Spielberg’s ability to tell the story with his visuals; you can still understand his films if you turn off the sound. We also tried to have poetry in the visuals, taking cues from the works of Terrence Malick and Nicolas Winding Refn. We also looked to film noir and the graphic novels of Mike Mignola. There’s almost too much to cover here!

Technically and aesthetically, we worked with a 2D/3D hybrid approach, pushing against the more standard “plastic” look of 3D CGI by incorporating our team’s knowledge of drawn animation, illustration, and graphic design to create moving (in both senses of the word) tableaux to tell our challenging mythic story. The style of the film combines ZBrush sculpts, Maya computer graphics, and Adobe After Effects, with a visual style created by aggressive pencil mark illustrated textures and backgrounds.

We started the project in 3D pre-viz (pre-visualization). We were initially going to do a cut-outs/illustrated approach, but loved the idea of working in 3D space—also, canoes and people are hard to draw! This was, for us, the first time we had been able to stage things in 3D space, being able to try out different camera lenses. This is much more freeing than working in 2D techniques, because with those, you have to lock yourself into the compositions and layouts earlier on and don’t really have the ability to change things without throwing out a ton of work already done and doing it over again. We also did extensive storyboards; it was a really complex story to get across. Then, once we had all the 3D assets (our digital visual elements) built, the story came to life even more; we saw so many more possibilities. The gang worked really hard on everything.

Our crew was incredibly talented and creative, but they didn’t know a lot of the really technical aspects of what we were trying to achieve. Everything was so new, so they trained on-the-job to get the knowledge we needed to make the film. They worked extra hard on all of that; we’re very thankful that they all went for it with us.

 You have been collaborating together in life and work for over two decades, and have made 15 animated short films together, but most of them are much lighter in tone and content than Skin for Skin, some quite hilarious—what made you change direction for this project?

We had always wanted to make a serious myth film, and for this topic, there wasn’t really room for humour. Previously we did a straight-up animated documentary (Dunvegan: Where the Trails Cross, for Alberta Historic Sites Service) and wanted to go back and revisit more of the history of our country. The story of Canada isn’t funny, and the research and angle we took (influenced by Coleridge) didn’t lend itself to humour. The deeper we got into the research and influences, the more the film dictated what it wanted to be. We also looked at Edgar Allan Poe (“The Raven”) as a resource, his Gothic sensibility. Carol loves his stuff and she wrote a short story inspired by his style, transposing the Hudson’s Bay Company history onto “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” The history that we chose to focus on occurred around the same time that Poe was beginning to write, so there was an interesting synchronicity. Governor Simpson’s travels with the Spring Brigade to check on the health of the company were also a great way for us to take the story all the way across the country.

We’ve always wanted to work with the NFB and took its mandate to heart: “The National Film Board’s mission is to provide new perspectives on Canada and the world from Canadian points of view, perspectives that are not provided by anyone else and that serve Canadian and global audiences by an imaginative exploration of who we are and what we may be.” The NFB also challenged us to work outside of our comfort zone regarding technique, visuals, and approach, so we sunk our teeth into that and definitely pushed ourselves in new directions!