After spending 33 years working for the National Film Board of Canada, I am now free to work as I wish and to offer my knowledge and experience to others. I have worked as a graphic designer, photographer, animator, cameraman, director, producer and executive producer - mostly in the animation and documentary fields. I have produced these forms as well as new media, drama and hybrids of them all.
Many of my productions have won awards and some have been nominated for Academy Awards. I love making things and working with creative people.
You can reach me via e-mail at erik@svenderiksen.com
My background
I was born in Denmark on Christmas Day in 1948, at home - in a small, windswept fishing village on the west coast of Jutland during a snowstorm. My family emigrated to Canada in 1952 and I reluctantly came along. We lived in a small, windswept fishing village on the west coast of British Columbia where I often wished for snowstorms.
In 1960 we moved to just outside of Vancouver and I spent my awkward, teenage years in a small seaside border town. As soon as I was able, I escaped to Denmark where I learned that I was a Canadian and when I returned to Canada, moved to Vancouver to go to Art School. I spent many years there, learning that poverty was a vow I could not take. So I went to work and this was in the field of animation.
I spent early work years shooting animation and doing motion graphics - sometimes making designs and creating sequences. This was high-craft film photography where one needed to understand film stocks and processing. Mostly one had to know how light affects film and how to create effects and movement. My occasional work, under contract, to the NFB became almost full time and I became a staff person in 1974.
In my years working for the NFB, I always worked out of Vancouver - though I did travel quite a bit. At first I was an animation cameraman and technical assistant. Then I became a director for a short children's film and, after that I went into producing. At first the work I produced was mostly animation, but it blossomed into live action drama and documentaries as the years went on. In 1996 I became the Executive Producer and Centre Director of the Vancouver Office of the NFB (the Pacific & Yukon Centre). A few years later I became Executive Producer for the Animation and Childrens Production Unit for the West, which covered territory from Manitoba to British Columbia and up to the Yukon.
I grew to dislike administration and personnel management, preferring to work creatively with teams of young (and old) talent on projects that set the imagination on fire. So, in 2000 I became a Senior Producer at the Vancouver Office and did just that. This was wonderful, but as I got older, I began to yearn for a kind of freedom to entertain ideas that did not always fit a public institution and its procedures. So, I took early retirement and now look forward to pursuing ideas that appeal to me as a person.