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Animated Short ‘Borrowed Time’ Makes Online Debut

Five years in the making, CG-animated short ‘Borrowed Time’ is directed by Pixar animators Andrew Coats and Lou Hamou-Lhadj and produced by Amanda Deering Jones.

Borrowed Time is an animated short set in the Old West directed by Pixar animators Andrew Coats and Lou Hamou-Lhadj and produced by Amanda Deering Jones. The film was just named Best Short by the Spark Animation Festival, taking place October 21-23 in Vancouver, “for its beautiful visuals in service of telling an emotional story.”

To date, Borrowed Time has played in more than 50 festivals and has won 13 awards, including Oscar-qualifying wins at the St. Louis Film Festival, the Nashville Film Festival, and this year’s Computer Animation Festival at SIGGRAPH.

Here’s the official synopsis:

A weathered Sheriff returns to the remains of an accident he has spent a lifetime trying to forget. With each step forward, the memories come flooding back. Faced with his mistake once again, he must find the strength to carry on.

Watch the film, which debuted today as a Staff Pick on Vimeo, in the player below:

Born in Peru of Colombian and Scottish parents, Coats traveled widely around the world with his family before settling in the U.S. at the age of 16. Meanwhile, Hamou-Lhadj’s childhood took root in the culturally rich suburbs of exotic southern New Jersey. Despite their disparate upbringings, their shared passions for fine arts and film led both Coats and Hamou-Lhadj to study Film at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. It was here that they first met, and learned they could combine those passions into the most rewarding of art forms: animation. Kindred spirits in their love for bringing things to life one frame at a time, they both worked on each other’s shorts during school, and vowed to someday make a film together when the time was right.

Hamou-Lhadj spent the next eight years at Pixar as a Character Artist on WALL•E, Toy Story 3, Partly Cloudy, Day & Night, Brave, The Toy Story That Time Forgot, and The Good Dinosaur. For the first three years, he and Coats stayed in close contact while Coats rose through the ranks at Blue Sky Studios, animating on Horton Hears a Who, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs and finally serving as a Character Lead on Rio. Coats then joined Pixar in 2010, where he has worked as an animator on Cars 2, Brave, Toy Story OF TERROR!, Inside Out and The Good Dinosaur.

Reuniting at Pixar rekindled the spark to create something together. During their spare time over the past five years, the duo has been learning, growing, failing, picking each other up and ultimately crafting their directorial debut, Borrowed Time.

Deering Jones, the producer of Borrowed Time, has worked for both DreamWorks Animation and Pixar Animation.

The music for Borrowed Time was written and performed by Gustavo Santaolalla, composer for The Motorcycle DiariesBiutiful and The Last of Us, as well as Best Original Score Academy Award winners Brokeback Mountain and Babel.

Source: Borrowed Time

Jennifer Wolfe's picture

Formerly Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network, Jennifer Wolfe has worked in the Media & Entertainment industry as a writer and PR professional since 2003.