Getting a film or video into a major international festival like Ottawa is tough. For instance, fewer than one out of 10 films (approximately 80 out of nearly 1000) submitted to last year's Ottawa International Animation Festival were selected for the official competition and another 20 or so made it into noncompetitive screenings called panoramas. (Panoramas generally contain works of interest that are not thought to be "competitive" for prizes.

Maureen Furniss.

Last year, I served on the Ottawa `96 selection committee along with British 2D animator Andy Wyatt and Canadian computer animator/Sheridan College instructor Stephen Barnes. The three of us began the process of watching the thousand animated works, ranging from 10 seconds to 30 minutes in length, beginning Monday, July 8 for 10 hours a day for 5 days and then for 4 hours a day for another 3 days.

Selective Viewing
We managed to do this, in part, through "selective viewing." At least half the productions submitted, I would guess, were turned off before they had ended. Those under five minutes had the best chance of being seen all the way, though even some of these never made it past the three minute mark. Time constraints and our desire to showcase only the most impressive works motivated us to turn off anything that obviously was not going to make the cut.

Subjectivity played a large part in our decisions, but that subjectivity was based on years of experience in creating, analyzing and/or teaching animation. What we "liked" in the screenings was less reflective of our personal tastes than of some mutually observed standard of "successful" animation. Although I am usually more drawn to experimental work, there were straight narrative films I felt very strongly about. Stephen and Andy, who seem more oriented toward representational images and story lines, were riveted by more than one abstract, non-narrative film. But despite all of our differences, the three of us almost always arrived at the same conclusions about the "competitiveness" of any given work. By the end of the screening process, we were able to articulate several points that seemed to characterize the works we watched to the end (and possibly considered for competition. It is these points which I would like to briefly summarize, for the benefit of first-time entrants, in particular.

DaDa by Piet Kroon.

One of the most important factors was the first impression. With a thousand films to watch, improperly cued videos quickly became irritating (at one point, I proposed that we create a prize for the best of the color bar formations we sawand heard, with ear-piercing clarity). Some entries were disqualified simply because we could not find them on a cassette filled with other titles that were not even entered in competition. Some entries were preceded by a number of demo-reel items and we were not sure whether the filmmaker had left them in trying to impress us, or was just careless. Some people/organizations entered more than one production and put all of them on one tape. This caused problems when we wanted to bypass a title and move on to the next one, or to return to it for a second look. If we could not find something after a few minutes, we put it aside.