Nouns Fest Opens 2024 Call for Submissions

The digital art collective Nouns has opened the call for submissions for the 2024 Nouns Fest, a short film competition and festival that will offer grants from a $1 million funding pool.

Nouns Fest will fund shorts of varying lengths, with budgets ranging from $7,500 to $20,000. Final animated shorts must incorporate interpretations of one or more of the Nouns digital art characters, which are auctioned off daily. Once funded, all rights to the shorts, concepts and characters will belong solely to the creators.

Of the short films accepted into the Nouns Fest project and fully produced, a total of 50 will be included in the festival this fall. Stoopid Buddy Stoodios, which helped conceive of the project and secure the involvement of Nouns, will produce three original shorts to debut at the festival.

Nouns Fest is co-founded by Walter Newman, former head of development at Adult Swim; Nouns veteran Joel Cares; music executive Joshua Fisher; and award-winning animator and director Goldy. It is an evolution of Nouns Short Shorts, an animation competition and festival that led to the production of 17 animated short films in 2023.

“We’re excited to create a platform that allows artists from across the globe to bring their ideas to life,” said Chris Waters, Nouns Fest co-founder and senior development executive. “Our goal is to empower and encourage animators—and give them total creative control.”

Eric Towner, co-founder of Stoopid Buddy and co-founder of Nouns Fest, said,“There’s no easy avenue for creators of animated shorts to get their work produced, and we wanted to change that. At the same time, true creative freedom is at the core of what Nouns does, so it’s at the very core of what we’re doing.”

“We want to hear from the best, most creative, most exciting animators in the world, whether they work professionally or are seeking to break into the animation industry,” Waters added.