A wildfire emergency in Australia helped convince Surrey resident Wahid Ibn Reza to create After Us, a new short film produced by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB).
The short, world-premiered during the recent Spark Animation festival in Vancouver, follows the journey of two animals in a post-human world.
Reza, an engineer who now works as a writer, filmmaker and actor, began the creative process back in 2020.
"It took about five years to do the whole thing because it's a very intense process with NFB, a very detailed structure," said Reza, a former actor in Bangladesh who was lured to Vancouver by the “Hollywood North” hype of MacGyver and The X-Files.
In part, Reza was inspired to make After Us after seeing a news photo of a koala caught in a forest destroyed by fire.
"The koala was looking straight into the camera and I could see in that animal's eyes, you know, thinking, 'What are you guys doing? You humans are supposed to be the smart animals.' I thought, 'Yeah, why are we doing this?' That's when I decided to tell a story about the environment crisis from the perspective of the animals, to be as true to them as possible."
Reza has contributed to Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated projects, and directed live-action and animated shorts rooted in sci-fi, fantasy, comedy and action. Visual-effect credits on imdb.com include Spider-Man: No Way Home, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, the series Rick and Morty, Suits, Captain America: Civil War and more.
"I've done a lot of comic-book movies which is cool because I'm a huge comic book guy," Reza said with a laugh. "I was a nerd before being a nerd was cool."
In After Us, a wolf and wolverine forge an unlikely bond when they "brave harsh elements and cross charred, desolate landscapes in search of others who might remain," according to a bio, which bills the short as "an epic CGI voyage, a meditation on resilience and the enduring courage of hope."
Watch an excerpt on the Vimeo platform.
"I'm very proud of the short, and everybody worked really hard on it," Reza said. "It's a different looking piece, it's not like traditional animation that we are used to watching. It looks like an art piece, and that's something that we wanted to do because when you are thinking of animation, you have to think of style first, what kind of style you want to do. I didn't want to make it hyper-realistic and I also didn't want to do, like, a childish one, like pre-schoolie (animation) because the message was heavy. My goal was to create images that look like a painting and hopefully, on subconscious level, the message stays with you and hopefully it will help you to make some better choices."
Reza's work adds to the NFB’s total collection of 14,135 works, according to report of the 2024-2025 fiscal year, when 39 original works were produced.
Nearly 2,400 contracts were awarded for audiovisual productions, 41 per cent of works were directed by emerging filmmakers, and $37.5 million went to production spending, the NFB reported on Sept. 25.
"In general, the NFB’s works attracted growing audiences, with 31 million views in Canada and 57.3 million views worldwide," a report says. "On nfb.ca, over 2.5 million views were recorded around the world, including nearly 2 million in Canada."
