Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1257506
F E AT U R E this page: Disney's Flowers and Trees was the first animated film to win an Oscar in the "Short Subjects, Cartoons" category in 1932. opposite: The Disney short Cycles experiments with virtual reality. 30 KEYFRAME "They're all quickly trying to build up their slates and using the shorts programs as a tool has been really successful," says Kari Kim, Vice President of Originals Development at Nickelodeon Animation, which launched its Intergalactic Shorts Program in June 2019. "It's been a beloved legacy at Nick, but we wanted to take a new look at the power of shorts." As an art form, animated film shorts stretch back to the late nineteenth century (one could argue that the medium really originated on cave walls 40,000 years ago), and the Academy began recognizing their value as early as its fifth Oscars ceremony in the 1930s. Disney's pioneering work in the medium led to more widespread use by Warner Bros. and other independent production entities in the television age, but once shorts were no longer packaged with features and attached to newsreels, they fell out of favor—until computers and digital design offered a whole new creative palette and nontraditional delivery channels multiplied. "Once Pixar came along, everyone saw the value in shorts and testing tech," says story artist Andrew Erekson (How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World), Director of the recent DreamWorks Animation short Marooned. "There are many benefits from doing the shorts program: finding new stories and new ways of storytelling; testing new talent; testing new ideas; testing new technologies. The main thing with shorts is being able to monetize them. That's always the challenge: What's the market for it? In this day and age, especially with streaming platforms, everybody wants content, and that's where shorts can be very beneficial and why they are coming more to the forefront." Nick's Intergalactic Shorts Program invites pitches from pretty much anywhere, with an eye toward locating new animation talent and supporting the development of original ideas that lead to longform series for a variety of platforms. Instead of