After the last tour Mike asked us if we could look into commissioning some films for the new tour. It's not something we've done in the three previous tours so we were excited about the possibilities. It took Robert and I all of about 2 seconds to come up with the dream list of animators to contact. We had heard from a couple of people that Smith & Foulkes of Nexus Productions were thinking of making a short film. After several emails and a few phone calls we had all agreed to make it happen. They asked us if we had anything in particular we were looking for and the only thing we had mentioned was that in the last program there seemed to be several films about death so we were hoping to keep that topic in as few films as possible this year. When we received the treatment for the film we thought it was really amazing and thought it was brilliant that the story was about two undertakers.
Another animator we've had the pleasure of working with this year is Joel Trussell. We've always been big fans of the music video War Photographer and Mike thought an introduction from Joel would be super awesome. Robert had a quick chat with Joel and then a few days later we received another really amazing treatment. He has been a busy guy and he's had a limited amount of time to finish the film so we offered to help in any way. He asked if we could help him with the music. I have to say he's not only extremely talented but he's been incredibly fun to work with these last few weeks.
It almost goes without saying that we love PES and think he's crazy talented. His films have been in almost every collection we've put out. So it made perfect sense to see if he would create something new just for us.
The other animator we contacted about commissioning some new films from was Dave Carter. He had submitted a couple of films into our online mobile phone film contest last year and they were some of our favorites. His timing couldn't have been better because he was coming to Los Angeles all the way from Australia and he wanted to show us some films he had just finished. He showed us the three original Pyshchotown films and we knew then that we had to have more. We sent a copy off to Mike and he agreed with us that Dave is one of the best new up and coming animators out there. So we asked Dave if he could make us a several new Psychotown episodes that would premiere in our program.I know I've just gushed heavily about the 4 filmmakers above but working with them has been one of the highlights from these last 5 years on the Animation Show. It’s an honor to premiere the films in our program and a special treat to have PES and Joel Trussell in attendance for our premiere night in Austin.