The Jerwood Charitable Foundation announced the winners of the inaugural Jerwood Moving Image Awards.
One of the three winners utilized animation: Johnny Kelly for his film PROCRASTINATION.
Each winner received 10,000 pounds in the first-ever major award in the UK for artists working with digital moving image.
PROCRASTINATION by Johnny Kelly is a vivid and funny account of putting things off, a human experience that anyone can relate to, and whose humor is derived from the sparkling interplay between the droll script and the dazzling visuals.
All of the winning films reflect the astonishing range and outstanding quality of the work currently being produced in this discipline and will establish their creators as leaders in their field.
The Jerwood Moving Image Awards were established earlier this year to support and promote the myriad disciplines that fall under the umbrella term 'digital moving image,' and to provide a platform for debating the present state and future prospects of the artform.
Kelly said, "The generous donation from Jerwood is going to be invested straight into my next film. ⦠And also a pair of badly needed glasses."
Kelly trained at the Dublin Institute of Technology and received an MA in Animation from the Royal College of Art in 2007.
At the Royal College, PROCRASTINATION was awarded one of six Conran Achievement Awards.
Johnny was awarded a Shark Award for Best New Director in 2007 and in the same year was part of the London International Animation Festival at the Curzon, Soho.
His work is inspired by such animation practitioners as Shynola, Smith & Foulkes and Michel Gondry.
PROCRASTINATION is an investigative and exploratory hands-on, gloves-off study into the practice of putting things 'off.'
Inspired by the struggles with creative block and distraction that surrounded the making of the film that became PROCRASTINATION, the animation offers an amusing and instantly recognisable representation of a universal experience.
Rather than being fully storyboarded beforehand, as is usually the case with animated short films, Kelly opted to work more instinctively and spontaneously; thinking on his feet, ideas were often generated and realized within a day.
Kelly said the process had a cathartic effect for him as a film-maker and it is hoped the viewer will feel similarly.
View all three winning short films at www.jerwoodmovingimage.org.
