U.K. Short ‘Facing It’ Takes Top Prize at 2019 VIEW Awards

By Terry Flores

LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – “Facing It,” a claymation/live-action film about how relationships mold people, has won the 2019 VIEW Conference Award for best short film. The film was written and directed by Sam Gainsborough and co-written by Louisa Wood and produced at the National Film and Television School’s Beaconsfield Studio in Beaconsfield, U.K.

The VIEW Awards are an offshoot of Italy’s , held each October. VIEW, which stands for Virtual Interactive Emerging World, draws top talent in visual effects, animation, gaming, virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality to its weeklong conferences to give talks, participate in panels and hold master classes.

Other award winners are “Trois Francs, Six Sous,” a 3D-animated short about a farmer in World War II France by co-directors Clémence Ottevaere, Florence Blain, Louise Leblond, Varoon Indalkar, Morgane Ladjel and Hugo Valdelièvre-Rattier, which won the jury prize for story; “Blieschow,” a short written and directed by Christoph Sarow and animated, for the most part, in Photoshop, which was honored for art direction; and “Red Hands, (Mani Rosse),” a stop-motion short by Italian director Francesco Filippi about domestic violence, which won the Italianmix award for best Italian film.

The jury for the VIEW Awards included VIEW Conference director Maria Elena Gutierrez, jury chair Barbara Robertson, “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” VFX supervisor Danny Dimian, PDI co-founder Glenn Entis and Baobab Studio chief creative officer and co-founder Eric Darnell.