Meet the team behind the magic
Paula Bourgie - Writer & Director
Paula was born in a family of undertakers. Before her first birthday, her father sold the business. She was spared the responsibility of taking over the funeral home and became a filmmaker instead, a profession much better suited for her wild and imaginative spirit.
Since discovering stop-motion at the age of ten, Paula has sought animation projects of all kinds and gained experience in stop-frame, hand-drawn and 2D digital animation. Through ambitious narrative student projects, corporate work, web series branding and miniature building, Paula has honed her skills as a director, animator and art director. “The Undertaker’s Daughter” is the logical next step in her journey, combining the crafts she developed in the past fifteen years.
This film is an ode to the stories of her youth, a fairytale that explores death, family and fate through the expressive medium of stop-motion. It’s a creative take on what her life could have been, a journey into her ancestors’ lives, a tale of a daughter left to fill her father’s shoes. While unmistakably macabre, it is also a story of hope and making one’s destiny their own.
Visit her portfolio here.
Stephanie Choriatis - Producer
Stephanie Choriatis is an award-winning independent film producer of narrative and non-fiction films based in New York City. She works as an educator for hands-on filmmaking and digital media education with students of all ages - from elementary school to college. Stephanie is attending Columbia University’s MFA program in Film, with a concentration in Creative Producing and is a recipient of the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation Fellowship. Stephanie has created a stop-motion animation curriculum for elementary and middle school students, teaching them the principles of animation. She encourages the kids to change the way they view the world by bringing every object to life with animation. Additionally, Stephanie worked as a video producer at Manhattan Prep, and produced dozens of education animated videos for varying educational content. Her main goal is to use media to educate and empower others to create impactful media themselves.
Kinder Labatt - Producer
Kinder Labatt is a Canadian producer, writer and filmmaker based in New York City. She is currently completing her MFA in producing at Columbia University. An avid fan of satire and comedy, she often incorporates topics relating to gender and politics into her work.
Her first short film, Free Pot, was featured in the 2018 Crown Heights Film Festival at the FiveMyles Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. Her original pilot script, REALITY, received the inaugural Charles J. Brucia Award at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her most recent works include Bake Sale, a short satirizing PTA mothers, and Madame Defender, a pilot script that explores a fictional account of the world’s first female dictator.
When taking a break from developing stories about strong, powerful female characters, she is probably singing a Janis Joplin song out of tune or baking bread, or more likely, both.
Auguste Portelance-Bédard - Cinematographer
Auguste is a storyteller at heart. Fascinated by the power of images, he pursued his interest in photography and film at Champlain College, and later Concordia University. There, he directed and shot tens of short films, cementing his ambition to become a filmmaker. As an undergraduate, Auguste competed in a national video competition three years in a row and won one bronze and two silver medals for his cinematography, directing and miniature-building work. Since then, he has freelanced as a cinematographer and worked on several big-scale feature and TV productions as a set production assistant. Auguste is eager to return to animation, excited about the freedom and visual control the medium allows.
Visit his portfolio here.
Raphaëlle Brissette - Executive Producer
Raphaëlle graduated from Concordia University in Montreal with a specialization in film. She has since worked for Moment Factory as a video-production coordinator on large-scale multimedia installations in multiple cities around the world. Her passion for moving images has led her to contribute to many short films and to produce a web series alongside her professional career. Her goal is to produce topical character-driven films that have the ability to induce empathy.
Jeanne Motulsky - Production Manager
Jeanne Motulsky has a history of working in the entertainment, VFX, advertising, performing arts industries. She completed a Bachelor’s Degree focused in Communication Studies with a specialization in Film and Video from Concordia University tackling a number of projects stemming from video production to music to stop-motion animation. Her credits include working as a production coordinator at Netflix for Cursed, Shadow & Bone, and Jupiter’s Legacy.
See her IMDB credits here.
