News and Events

Graduate’s Itch earns global recognition

7 December 2007

A BU animation graduate has taken top honours at a major UK film festival.

Joel Green has been named as the top ‘International Newcomer in Animation’ at the annual Encounters Short Film Festival in Bristol.

Joel collected a cheque for £2,500 at the event, which welcomed over 1,750 submissions this year from a record 66 countries. The Festival was established 13 years ago to showcase the best new animated and live action films of under 30 minutes in length.

Joel’s film, ‘The Itch’, fended off opposition from Australia, Asia, Europe and North America to take the prize. Just 1 minute and 42 seconds long, ‘The Itch’ tells the story of a man who is trailed by an unwelcome companion that he can’t shake off.

Joel, 22, is originally from St Albans in Hertfordshire and graduated in 2006 with a BA (Hons) in Computer Visualisation and Animation from BU. He now lives in London where he works on film visual effects at Double Negative.

Earlier this year, he completed work on the fifth Harry Potter film – ‘Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix’.

In April, Joel was invited to screen The Itch at one of the world’s top animation festivals – SIGGRAPH – in San Diego, California. He was joined by fellow graduate Ben Jones who screened his work ‘Fat Chance’ at the festival – the Special Interest Group for Computer Graphics.

The event was attended by tens of thousands of computer professionals from all over the world.

The NCCA was recently named by ‘3D World magazine’ as the number one place in the UK to study computer animation. The Centre’s global success at major festivals, including SIGGRAPH, placed the NCCA at number eight among the world’s elite in a new ‘CGI Ivy League’.