Sorry, this is a film company.”

This is what Calgary filmmaker Cam Christiansen writes in small, neat cursive in my notebook. He does this five minutes after he apologetically answers a phone call during our interview in the back corner of Caffè Beano and while he is still on the phone.

In many ways, it sums up my impression of the 38-year-old Calgarian at the end of our chat. He is friendly, has a creative mind, is humble and slightly awed by his recent success — success he has earned for the short film he made for local musician Kris Demeanor’s witty song, “I Have Seen the Future.” Christiansen seems like an intelligent guy who has quickly grasped that making films is a tough business. Business that needs to be taken care of, sometimes even in the middle of an interview.

The unheard voice on the other end of the phone is talking, a lot. Christiansen can barely get a word in edgewise for the first half of the call. Sitting beside him, trying half-heartedly not to eavesdrop, I hear him first talk about his short film and then go on to quickly pitch his latest film undertaking — a feature-length adaptation of Dave Bidini’s play Five Hole: Tales of Hockey Erotica.

Upon hanging up, Christiansen apologizes profusely and sincerely, and we continue right where we left off, talking about I Have Seen the Future’s inclusion in the 2008 Sundance Film Festival.

“I was sitting there with my finger on the button [of my computer], debating with myself whether or not I wanted to do this,” says Christiansen about his decision to submit the film for consideration to Sundance. But, he says, “of all the festivals that I dreamed of getting into, I thought it would be the best.” And after hearing him tell stories of meeting Quentin Tarantino, having a pleasant chat with Isabella Rossellini and jockeying for a table in front of Robert Redford, it is easy to think he was right.

However, the story of I Have Seen the Future does not begin in Park City, Utah, but further north, in Calgary. It begins with Demeanor’s song, which appears on the Calgary singer-songwriter’s 2007 album, The Guilt and the Shame — Tales of the Canadian West.

The song tells the true story of a tennis game played one summer afternoon in Calgary between Demeanor and his father.

A trio of teenage boys rudely interrupts the game and as the verbal taunts of the boys become nastier and more profane, Demeanor remembers his own juvenile exploits growing up. The title stems from the main repeated hook of the chorus, “I have seen the future and I don’t know what to blame. So I will wish it all the best and continue with my game.” Straddling the line between spoken word and song, it is just one example of Demeanor’s strong storytelling ability.

A graduate of the painting program at the Alberta College of Art and Design and the University of Calgary’s Industrial Design degree, Christiansen has been steadily growing his multimedia company Anlanda Digital Studio for the last eight years. It specializes in animated video production, mostly for advertising agencies. According to Christiansen, video production accounts for 80 to 90 per cent of Anlanda’s work.

Through his wife, Maureen Hodgen, who is the design and development manager for Theatre Junction at the Grand, Christiansen began working to create visuals for the stage productions put on by Theatre Junction’s resident company of artists, which at the time included Demeanor.

“That’s when I started doing these purely creative animation projects and I got the bug basically,” says Christiansen.

Later, he saw the quirky song performed live and approached Demeanor about turning it into an animated short film. “I get inspired by his writing. I think it is so funny and so clever,” says Christiansen.

He was able to secure funding from Bravo!FACT, the Foundation to Assist Canadian Talent, and assembled a team to create the film that included himself as animator and director, Demeanor filling the credits as writer, vocalist and songwriter, animator Scott Underhill, choreographer Kysten Blair and musician Peter Moller.

I Have Seen the Future utilizes motion capture animation. The technique is usually found in big-budget films and video games — Gollum from The Lord of the Rings and the digitization of athletes in the latest sports games are two good examples. The technique involves filming or “capturing” the movement of a real person, then using computers to transform the real image into animation.

Christiansen says he has always been interested in the technique. “I was excited by the fact that motion capture was something that was becoming accessible for an independent producer like myself,” he says.

After experimenting with what he calls a “homegrown Red Green version” of motion capture — or “mocap” as it is often called — utilizing ping-pong balls, he was able to incorporate some of those ideas into the making of I Have Seen the Future.

After completing the film, which took a total of three months, Christiansen had no idea what would become of it. “My expectations were to just be shown on Bravo television,” he says. “I thought that would be fantastic. A national broadcast, that would be so cool. But that was it.”

But that wasn’t it. Bravo!FACT submitted the film to the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival and it was accepted. For Christiansen, attending his first major film festival was exciting and also educational.

While at a director’s brunch with luminary filmmakers including Deepa Mehta and Kiss of the Spider Woman director Hector Babenco, Christiansen learned the challenges he had faced were not unique. “I realized, talking to everyone, that they are all struggling with the same issues that I do in a short or in any other project,” he says. “[Filmmaking] usually involves lots more money.”

Upon realizing this, he had the confidence and desire to make Five Hole, his first feature-length project.

The play is based on a collection of hockey erotica written by Dave Bidini of the Rheostatics and adapted and performed for the stage by the One Yellow Rabbit ensemble at the 2007 High Performance Rodeo. The play is a series of vignettes that fuse two topics that are of great interest to Canadians: sex and hockey. The cast of characters tell their stories, each tale centred around those two themes. Christiansen was drawn to the play after seeing it on stage. It appealed to him on an artistic level and he felt that, much like I Have Seen the Future, the stories possessed certain qualities he felt would resonate with viewers.

“I’ve never really seen a play like this, and I thought that’s a good thing for a film project to have, that potential to be art-house and quirky, but also draw from this popular sentiment of hockey and sex,” says Christiansen.

Deciding what his next project would be and making it are two different things, but he is well into the process, having already secured the support of Bidini, One Yellow Rabbit and partnerships with the Banff Centre and Bravo!FACT. And the success of his short film has helped in his effort to make Five Hole. “I met with certain funders that initially didn’t want to be involved in Five Hole and then through hearing I was in Sundance and all these things, they were a lot more interested,” Christiansen says. “It gave me a lot more credibility with people. For that, I’m totally grateful.”

Christiansen may have gotten a glimpse into the future with the success of his short film, but for now, he is focused on the present, working hard on getting Five Hole made. And until he does, there will be more phone calls from film companies that he needs to take and more apologetic notes scrawled on interviewers’ notebooks.