FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: APRIL 26, 2022 ‘The ABCs of Anxiety’ York U ‘Community Comedy Arts’ project offers a 2-minute break from pandemic angst
"All the stress was getting to me. The pandemic, work, lockdowns, variants, isolation, other people. The anxiety loop had swallowed me whole.” [Artist & Writer Sean Sinclair-Day].
The ‘ABCs of Anxiety’ is a 2-minute animated video created as a York University Grad Community Arts project. The video features the incredible artwork of Sean Sinclair-Day, a Toronto-based illustrator and writer, and offers 26 reasons [A-Z] why the last two years have been so hard on all of us.
The York Graduate student who initiated the project is Brian G. Smith, the project director, and an award-winning Second City alumnus. “When I saw Sean’s kooky characters on Instagram, I was immediately floored by how well they captured our COVID angst. I knew I wanted to do something with them.”
Smith successfully applied for a grant from York’s Wellness Initiative Fund to create a cartoon based on Sinclair-Day’s drawings, and the ABCs poem he wrote. The project's end goal is to provide viewers with a small dose of comic relief.
This ‘Community Comedy Arts’ project included 15 York Grad students from the Film, Music, Digital Marketing and Psychology departments. Hamilton media artist Darryl Gold crafted the ‘beatnik-esque’ animation for the bizarre images. Sinclair-Day: “If the ebb and flow of anxiety is something I’m always going to have to deal with, I need to find a way to laugh at it.”
Watch the film below: