I suspect Canadian animator Jamie Gallant will win one of these upcoming 11 Second Club competitions, and in February he placed in the top 20. Here’s his Flash-animated traditional take the musically-driven competition.
Canadian animator Jamie Gallant produced this TV spot last year for Juicy Cool, the stand-up pouch that comes with a straw inside.
County Ghost creator Mike Geiger has taken a stand against the massive amount of spending his homeland has poured into the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. This animated “peaceful protest” calls out the Canadian government for missing a golden opportunity to funnel money “into more meaning avenues.” The Flash-animated short, titled How To Run a School 2010 Winter Games Style, was produced in conjunction with the NFB’s CITIZENShift program, “a multimedia platform dedicated to media for social change.”
Nick Cross, the award-winning animator behind films like The Waif of Persephone and Yellow Cake, has embarked on a new short. For The Pig Farmer, however, Cross is staging a fundraising effort to help get the film finished quicker. Using the fundraising website IndieGoGo he aims to raise $5,000, and I just tossed $25 onto the pile. For that I get a mention in the credits and a DVD of the finished film. If I had forked over $100, Cross would have listed me as an Associate Producer and shipped me his entire catalog of films. (update – Nathan Malone added his name to the Associate Producer list)
There’s a few similar sites out there, including Fundable, Kickstarter and Indie Maverick, and animators around the world are having success using this model. For instance, I spotted Line, a stop-motion film by Justin and Shel Wagner Rasch, which has already raised $1,250 en route to their goal of $2,500, and a documentary about documentary about Bill Plympton that’s raised almost as much.
This method seems like no more than a sophisticated version of the ol’ Paypal “donate” button, but it’s apparently working. I’ve always imagined that fundraising is entirely personal, requiring lots of shmoozing, hand-shaking and repeated appeals. But perhaps you just need a slew of Facebook friends and a blog.
The team at Canadaian studio Loogaroo, which is run by ex-Fatkat kingpin Gene Fowler, is hoping you’ll like Space Knights, a 22-minute, Flash-animated pilot for Detour, the adult block on Canada’s TELETOON network. The project is part of an animated contest that pits 10 series against eachother in a vote-a-thon. So far, Nerdland and Dunce Bucket have proved the most popular amongst viewers, but the recently-released Space Knights is already hurtling to the top. Here’s a short intersticial clip featuring the Green Knight:
