Evan Jones

Melding Technical Expertise with Creative Thinking

Evan Jones is Co-Owner of Stitch Media Inc., a leader in interactive media production with offices in Halifax and Toronto. He is a two-time Emmy Award winner whose innovative work on interactive content has established him as a pioneer in many new media genres, including Alternate Reality Games and interactive documentary.

Evan has always sought to meld his understanding of the technical world with a deep desire to be creative. After graduating from Sheridan, he attended the prestigious Canadian Film Centre for post-graduate studies. Soon after, Xenophile Media hired him as Creative Director, and Evan proceeded to develop the ReGenesis Extended Reality Game, which earned him one of his two 2007 Emmy Awards. (The other was for the Alternate Reality Game, Fallen).

Eager to pursue his own ideas, Evan formed Stitch Media in 2007. “Our name represents both the technical interaction and the storytelling components of our work. We strive to be the thread that stitches media together.”

Stitch Media has established itself as a leader in the interactive world, collaborating with Fox Television, CBC, Bell, Rogers and Shaw Media, among others. Evan’s diverse projects include the thought-provoking Redress Remix, a history of the racist Canadian Chinese Head Tax. Consisting of a three-part documentary television series, feature film and accompanying website, the project won a 2011 World Summit Award from the United Nations.

On the lighter side, Moderation Town is a webseries about a Maritime town whose residents become Internet Moderators after the local factory closes, the disturbing yet hilarious culture of the internet becoming their reality. The six-part series won the 2011 nextMEDIA Digital Launch Pad. Stitch is now working on an educational project addressing the M.S. St. Louis, a boat that sailed in 1938 from Germany to North America seeking refugee status. Such innovative projects have led to Evan being named one of the Top 10 New Media Groundbreakers of the past decade by the Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund.

Evan has taught and been a keynote speaker for organizations worldwide. He also co-founded the IGDA Alternate Reality Games SIG and was involved with the FITC Design & Technology Festival. Always seeking to push the envelope with his work, Jones says he has been “handed a gift” and never takes that for granted.

At one point, Evan believed he was destined to be a software programmer by day and a creative writer by night. The Interactive Multimedia program is where he began to fuse the two interests. “There was such a wide range of talent there that we actually fuelled each other,” he says. “You would see what was happening on each others’ screens and it would push you to trying something you hadn’t tried before. That was a great culture to be in.”