British Animation Awards 2014 Finalists Announced

The biennial British Animation Awards have announced their slate of nominees for 2014. This year sees the introduction of two new categories: Best Voice Performance and Student Excellence; the latter stands in addition to the existing Best Student Film category, while the former led to the BBC website opening a news report with the brilliant sentence “Nighy was nominated for his voicing of a corpse in a short film.” The category for stop-motion commercials, meanwhile, has been dropped.

The awards, which are one-of-a-kind pieces of sheep-related artwork created by a who’s who of the animation communitiy, will be presented on March 7th at the BFI, Southbank. Here is the complete list of nominees:

Best Voice Performance
Morwenna Banks in Ben & Holly’s Little Kingdom: Nanny’s Magic Test
Bill Nighy in The Hungry Corpse
Tim Dann in Compost Corner

Best Long Form
Room on the Broom (Max Lang & Jan Lachauer)
The Pirates! In An Adventure with Scientists (Peter Lord)
The Snowman & The Snowdog (Hilary Audus)

Best Pre-School Series
Peppa Pig: “Mr Bull in a China Shop” (Philip Hall & Joris van Hulzen)
Q Pootle 5: “The Groobie Woogie” (Adam Shaw)
Sarah & Duck: “Bobsleigh” (Tim O’Sullivan)

Best Children’s Series
Shaun the Sheep: “The Stand Off” (Lee Wilton)
Compost Corner (Westley Wood)
Amazing World of Gumball: “The Apology” (Ben Bocquelet & Mic Graves)

Best Mixed Media Children’s
Baby Jake: “Popping Peas” (Maddy Darrall & Rafa Canales)
Num Tums: “No 5” (Steve Smith)
Get Squiggling Letters: “Letter A” (Dan Edgley & Adrian Hedley)

Best Music Video
Benjamin Scheuer: “The Lion” (Peter Baynton)
Atoms for Peace: “Before Your Very Eyes” (Andrew Thomas Huang)
Savages: “Marshal Dear” (Gergely Wootsch)

Best Commissioned Animation
NPSCC: Sarah’s Story (Moth Collective)
Apodemy (Katerina Athanasopoulou)
RSPB: Vote for Nature (Morgan Powell & Neil Kidney)

Best 2D Commercial
Barclays: “Life Skills” (Marc Reisbig)
WWF: “We Don’t Farm Like This” (againstallodds)
“Mindfull” (Shay Hamias & Will Barras)

Best 2D Commercial
TSB: “The Story” (Marc Craste)
Talk Talk: “Model Britain” (Daniel Kleinman)
Honda: “Hands” (Smith & Foulkes)

Best Film/TV Graphics
Filth Credits (Frater)
BBC Olympics: “Stadium UK” (Pete Candeland)
“Gumball Machine” (Damian Hook & Daniel Fuller)

Best Short Film
Marilyn Myller (Mikey Please)
Everything I Can See From Here (Sam Taylor & Bjorn-Erik Aschim)
In the Air Is Christopher Gray (Felix Massie)

Best Student Film
Anomalies (Ben Cady)
Shirley Temple (Daniela Sherer)
The Day I Killed my Best Friend (Antonio J Busto Algarin)

Student Excellence
The Laughing Policeman (Marcus Armitage)
Gutenberg (Amalie Vilmar)
I am Tom Moody (Ainslie Henderson)

Best Motion Graphics
Handle with Care (Jun Iwakawa)
Darkside (Darren Dubicki)
Apocalypse Rhyme (Oliver Harrison)

(BAA illustration by Katerina Athanasopoulou)