

This bit of video fun popped up on YouTube last night, and within a few hours everyone we knew was tweeting about it. Turns out it is the handiwork of Brett Lamb—who happens to also be one of our staff illustrators—and so we asked him to tell us a bit more about the piece and its origins.

Here is the story of the Scroll:

I did it as part of the Queen West Art Crawl fundraiser last March. They do a thing where artists and performers get paired up to work collaboratively, with a limited amount of time—which is why [this] seems somewhat unfinished—and then all the pieces are shown and performed at a fundraising event. I did the animation and then Suba [Sankaran] and Dylan [Bell] added the audio.

The Scroll of Queen West is a sort of personal history of the street. Dr. Scott, the character in the piece, was a vet who worked the stockyards and was also the chief inspector at Toronto Abbatoirs; I knew him when I first moved to Toronto. He couldn’t believe that the area had turned into the artsy zone, and he had lots of stories about what it was like when he worked there, when the city really was “Hogtown.” (Oddly, the stories always had to do with someone getting beat up.) So this is sort of an imaginary contemporary tour of the area for his character (the actual Dr. Scott died years ago).

All the details in the piece are based on real places and events. One key one is the recurring black SUV. Each appearance of the black SUV marks a location where I saw a cyclist get whacked by a black SUV—except for the one in front of the Citytv building. That’s where I myself was doored by a black SUV.