Tees movie wins RTS Award

A scary animated film produced by a team of computing lecturers and students from the University of Teesside has won one of the major awards at the Royal Television Society's North East and Borders regional awards.

The nine-minute 3D computer-animated stunner ‘Emily and the Baba Yaga’ took the prize for the BEST DRAMA OR ENTERTAINMENT PRODUCTION (with production costs of under £50k) at the RTS Awards on Saturday night.

RTS judges said Emily and the Baba Yaga “delivered powerful imagery, strong characterisation and meticulous construction.”

The RTS web site adds: ‘The judging panel unanimously agreed that the winner (which also receives the Bannatyne's Fitness Trophy) was a truly outstanding piece of work. It was Emily and the Baba Yaga from Lynchpin Productions, produced by Siobhan Fenton and directed by Clive Tonge.

Clive and Siobhan are both lecturers in Computer Animation at the University of Teesside. The film took three years to make, involving a 21 strong team of traditional artists and digital animators, 18 of which are graduates or staff of the university.

Last month Emily and the Baba Yaga won the Encyclopedia of Fantasy Film and TV’s Best Animated Film of 2005 award pushing ‘Wallace and Gromit. Curse of the Were Rabbit’ into second place.

“All this attention is really a fantasy come true for all of us involved with the production,” said Siobhan. Last year the Teesside film-makers were invited to screen the movie at film festivals all over Europe and in the United States at the Los Angeles International Short Film Festival in Hollywood.

“This latest award gives us all a fantastic boost and I would like to congratulate the whole team. It is a firm endorsement of the quality of the work being produced by academics and students at Teesside,” said Clive.

• The Baba Yaga film was first shown at Animex, Middlesbrough’s international festival, last year. The 2006 Animex Festival opens today.
• The University of Teesside’s success didn’t end with the Baba Yaga at the RTS. Recent Teesside BA (Hons) Television Production Professional Practice graduate Danielle Jones won the BEST STUDENT FACTUAL PRODUCTION for her film Working the Zone. The winner by a unanimous decision of all of the judges, Danielle’s film was commended as demonstrating “journalistic maturity. It incorporated a good range of relevant interviews, sympathetically dealt with, within a well-structured piece.” Danielle will now represent the North East in the RTS National Student Awards in April.

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