Andrew Coats and Lou Hamou-Lhadj’s computer animated short film Borrowed Time has launched online via Vimeo — unsurprisingly, as a Vimeo Staff Pick — along with a new featurette about the film. Borrowed Time made a big splash as the Best in Show winner at the 2016 SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival this summer, and among its accolades was just named Best Short of the Spark Animation Festival (Oct. 21-23, Vancouver).
In Borrowed Time, 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.
Borrowed Time has been selected for over 50 festivals and won 13 awards in total. Three of these were Oscar qualifying wins: St. Louis Film Festival (Best Animated Short), Nashville Film Festival (Grand Jury Prize), and SIGGRAPH. The film also earned honors at the USA Film Festival, Fastnet Film Festival, Blue Plum Animation Festival, Brooklyn Film Festival, Animation Block Party, Woods Hole Film Festival, Skyline Indie Film Fest, Breckenridge Film Festival, Charlotte Film Festival and Spark.
Directors Andrew Coats and Lou Hamou-Lhadj met in the Film program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, working on each other’s shorts. After school, Hamou-Lhadj spend the next eight years as a character artist at Pixar, working on shorts and features including WALL-E, Toy Story 3, Partly Cloudy and Day & Night. Coats spent three years climbing the ladder at Blue Sky — animating on Horton Hears A Who!, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs and serving as character lead on Rio — before joining Pixar in 2010 and reuniting with Hamou-Lhadj, while working on Cars 2, Brave, Inside Out, et al. Back together, the friends finally put their finely honed skills to work in their directorial debut: Borrowed Time.
