Aniboom 4 Sesame Street Awards
I don’t know about you – but I grew up on Sesame Street. Every morning I would turn on the TV (do you remember the days before remote controls? I do – and yes, I know I’m aging myself here) and watch Sesame Street. Oscar the Grouch and Cookie Monster were my favorites. Just thinking about it conjures up warm memories of peanut butter and jelly with milk and chocolate chip cookies, giving my mom some quiet time before going into the backyard to play. And this is the magic of Sesame Street – most of us have grown up with them, worldwide. Sesame Street conjures up warm memories for millions of people.
Animator Opportunities
This is why we were so nervous and excited when we decided to do the Aniboom awards for sesame street. Excited because we could bring our talented animators a true professional opportunity to create an animation for the one and only Sesame Street. Nervous, because Aniboom animators haven’t been given an opportunity to tackle the genre of “animation for kids”, let alone pre-school, previously. We were also nervous about the demand, and what would we get when we asked animators to “go wild” with the classic PINBALL track.
Aniboom Animators Rock!
As it turned out, Aniboom animators can hit any curve-ball that comes their way and hit it home. Once the submissions started coming in, we left our worries behind as the excitement took over in the wake of high quality, creative and on the mark animations coming in.
We were so happy to see a daily feed of awesome pre-school readiness skills videos, pro-social pinball re-animation and re-imagination, and tons of freestyle pre-school targeted animations.
Needless to say, we were impressed, but it wasn’t only us – the Sesame Street team was as well. So impressed, that on top of the grand winner, they decided to fund another 3 videos that made it as finalists to be further developed and aired on Sesame Street. On top of that, imagine how the Sesame Street team felt when they sat down and watched 40 top of the line re-animations of the classic pinball animation. Sesame Street even picked one of the pinball animations as the Grand Prize Winner.
Animation Winners
The Community Winner – Rock Star 7 by Mithum Kumara – was awarded a cash prize of $5k.
The videos picked to premiere on Sesame Street:
- Pinball animation stop-motion re-make by Florence Animation. They were the grand winners
- Lonely Eleven by mari jay – who was the best school readiness skills
- Question Of The Day: Diversity by Tony dusko – best pro social
- Roll Call by William Levin – best “sky’s the limit” animation
Because their animations were chosen to be featured on Sesame Street, each of the animators above received an extra $5k on top of the original $5k they received for being a Finalist. The Grand Prize Winner received $10 K for winning.
