The 2007 Ottawa International Animation Festival wrapped up last night, and a few Flash-animated submissions took home awards. Golden Age, Aaron Augenblick’s series of comedy shorts grabbed the Grand Prize for Best-Commissioned Animation, while Squeeze the Day, a 2006 episode of Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends, grabbed the award for Television Animation for Children.

Nick Cross’ Flash-animated The Waif of Persephone screened in the Narrative Short Animation category, and a Cross was featured in an article at canoe.ca in the weeks leading up to the event.

Nick Cross’ The Waif of Persephone, a 12-minute Flash-animated short, is now available on DVD. You can purchase the disc off Cross’ website, where he’s set up a Paypal account. The price is $13.99 and this includes shipping to Canada, the US and international addresses. Let’s all pull out our wallets and support the independent animator community. I just threw down my $13.99, and I already had a review copy. In the meantime, enjoy this teaser clip from the film.

Nick Cross, whose work can be seen in the recent animated Tenacious D video Classico, has releaed the first 2 minutes of his Flash-animated film The Waif of Persephone. I recently watched the film on a special sneak preview DVD, and it’s marvelous. Nick is currently in process of entering the film into a variety of festivals, so we’ll all have to wait for a full online version, but in the meantime, enjoy.

John K, the creator of the ‘Ren & Stimpy,’ called Nick Cross “my genius find here up north,” in a 2003 AWN interview. Nick, who lives in Ottawa, worked with John on Ren & Stimpy ‘Adult Party Cartoon,’ on which he served up storyboards, layouts, background and character designs. Since then, Nick has set out to create his own animated classic, a short called ‘The Waif of Persephone,’ which has received attention over at both Drawn! and Cartoon Brew.

Nick’s animation process has been well catalogued on his Plog (production blog). He performs digital clean-up on pencil sketches, and then assembles his shots in Flash. It’s a painstaking method that offers up fantastic results. Nick has been bleeding out short clips of his film, and I recommend having a look at releases from last year, this March and June.