Comedy Central Launches Animated Shorts Program

Comedy Central announced today a new animated shorts program today designed to allow creators to submit short-form animated ideas directly to the network. It will offer development deals to certain projects that it likes.

The Viacom-owned channel is borrowing from the playbook of its corporate sister Nickelodeon and their animated shorts program, which claims Chris Savino’s The Loud House as its biggest success story.

“We hope the Animated Shorts Program is an evolution of our continuous history of finding the next great comedic voices,” said Sarah Babineau and Jonas Larsen, the network’s executive vice presidents and co-heads of talent and development. “We are grateful to the very smart people at Nickelodeon who originated this incubator, and we are excited to put the Comedy Central touch on it with hopefully the same successful results Nickelodeon has found.”

This initiative to build an artist development incubator is being led by Comedy Central development executives Jose Acevedo, Ian Friedman, Kelci Parker, and Michael Stanger, who hope that they use it as a platform to break in new animation talent as they’ve done in live-action through programs like The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, Broad City, Drunk History, and Comedy Central Presents: Stand-Up.

The Animated Shorts Program is open for submissions beginning today, and open to creators throughout North America. The program is looking for projects one-to-three minutes in length.

There are no restrictions on styles and techniques. Projects using hand-drawn, digital 2d, cg, stop motion, or mixed media are all welcome. Deadline for submissions is December 31, 2018. Specifications for submissions are available on the Comedy Central website.