OCFF 2022 – Animation Shorts

The 6th Annual Ocean City Film Festival, or OCFF, returns to in-person screenings at five venues throughout the resort town. The festival will showcase over 100 independent films. Over 20 of those are films from filmmakers from the Delaware, Maryland and Virginia area. The majority of those are short films that are packaged together in blocks, according to their genre or thematic similarity. One of those blocks is the collection of films that are a part of the Animation Shorts. These are films that are fiction narratives, displaying the wealth and the breadth of imagination with 2D and 3D animation, hand-drawn, computer-assisted or stop-motion.

First Contact by Geoff Allen. Allen is part of the Team Laundry Sketch Comedy. They have a Facebook page that’s described as slapstick, satire and slippery slopes. Their videos are pretty hilarious with contributors like Craig Sutton acting out ridiculous things rather brilliantly. This is one of the few, if not the only sketch they’ve done that’s animated instead of Sutton’s live-action. It involves humans trying to talk to aliens.

Where the Sea Met the Sky by Maddie Billok. Billok is a 2D animator from upstate New York. She graduated from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design with a bachelor’s in animation in 2021. She now resides in Boston. Her work stems from a childhood love of fantasy and the possibilities of the intersection between magic and the mundane. Her work aims to convey fantastical worlds aided by the use of vivid color. Her film is about the transmogrification of those things and the literal personification of such.

Heartstrings by Erin Donahue. Erin Donahue is a 3D artist and production manager for animated projects and immersive experiences. Originally from a small town in central Ohio, she earned her BFA in 3D animation at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), graduating summa cum laude. This film was her senior capstone. Donahue has previously interned with the Disney Parks and Ohio Film Group/Lengi Studios. Previously she was a HBO Max design management intern at WarnerMedia. This film centers around an Irish immigrant named Ailidh in New York City and her father.

Once There Was a Girl by Deb Ethier. Ethier is Rusty Bolt Theatre/Seat of the Pants Film Lab. She’s an animator, musician, graphic designer, writer. She wears all of the hats, although she sometimes collaborates with other voice-over artists or musicians. Short and micro-short animated films are her passion, including one-minute works, and they range from wacky off-kilter comedies to poetic immersions to surreal noir-inspired nightmares. All of her films are low or no budget creations.

Artifact by Durotimi Akinkugbe. Nicknamed DT, Akinkugbe was born and raised in Lagos, Nigeria. He attended secondary school in the United Kingdom, then moved over to the United States for university. Having attained a bachelor of arts with a double major in psychology and studio art, he has recently completed his master of fine arts in 3D animation at the Rochester Institute of Technology. This film follows an object, transformed through its interactions with humans across time. In conceptualizing the film, DT wanted to portray the passage of time, the immensity of its length in comparison to our lives. The things we do, create, and the actions we take can outlive us several times over.

Post #MeToo by Phoebe Chingying Man. She’s a Chinese conceptual artist, based in Hong Kong and born in 1969. This film animated coloring pages of the audience. Around 230 people joined Phoebe Man’s socially-engaged art “Free Coloring If I Were” in workshops and exhibitions responding to the #MeToo Movement. Participants had to imagine with empathy themselves as a victim, a perpetrator and a bystander.

Bucket Hat! by Demetrios Tzamaras. Demetrios Tzamaras is a Greek-American story artist and animator. Currently an MFA student in the Animation Workshop at UCLA’s School of Theatre, Film & Television, Tzamaras was previously a coordinator on the Academy Award-winning film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, among others. In 2014, he graduated from Drexel University with a B.S. in Film Production. Tzamaras believes in telling stories with heart, humor, and visual spectacle, drawing from classic American film-making as inspiration. His film centers on brothers, Tot and Meech who try desperately to convince their jokester Papou (Greek for “grandfather”) to buy them ice cream while on a trip to the beach. Influenced by the TV shows of Cartoon Network in the 1990’s, it’s a delightfully silly and sweet animated film that balances slice-of-life realism with cartoon slapstick.

Ten Degrees of Strange by Lynn Tomlinson. Tomlinson is known for clay on glass animation: spreading a layer of oil-based modeling clay and altering the image to create a moving painting full of fluid transformations. Tomlinson’s work has been exhibited in one-person shows at Cornell University and the University of Delaware and in group shows at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, and the National Gallery, and is in the Education Department collection of the Museum of Modern Art (New York). She is an Associate Professor at Towson University. Her film is a music video based on a song by Robert Macfarlane and Johnny Flynn, from the album Lost in the Cedar Wood. Taking inspiration from The Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient story written on clay tablets.

The Feast by Zeb Blair. This short film is one of six, short films produced by the Baltimore Rock Opera Society (BROS). It’s playing separately here on Sunday, but it would also have played as part of the feature-length production called HOLES: A Puppet Anthology, which screens at OCFF the day before on Saturday. In this short, the tiny village of Chowtown, sees the biggest as the best. Therefore, the person who eats the most is elected to rule over the rest! It’s a flawless system until a stranger introduces a brand new innovation to the world… cannibalism.

Egg by Li-Wei Hsu. Li-Wei Hsu was born and raised in Taiwan, moved to NYC in 2016 to pursue animation. She’s an environmentalist, visual artist, and animal lover. She graduated in 2021 with a BFA in animation from New York’s School of Visual Arts. Her film’s premise takes us to a plastic formed island in the great Pacific ocean where a lonely man found and hatched a supermarket egg.

Sweet Life by Justin N. Freeman. Justin Freeman is an animator and story artist born and raised in Bowie, Maryland. From a young age, he knew that he wanted to be an artist, and spent his time drawing his favorite characters from cartoons on television at the time. Growing up on a healthy diet of anime such as Dragon Ball Z and Pokémon, he was never lacking in inspiration. After years of making original art and comics, Justin was accepted into the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2013. Initially hoping to study illustration to become a comic book artist, he instead pursued a degree in animation. Justin graduated from CIA in 2021 with a bachelor of fine arts degree in animation after finishing this film, which is his thesis work, an animated short dealing with themes of active listening and altruism.