Flickerpix has won a prestigious BFI Vision Award, a National Lottery funded initiative intended to enable production companies to build their feature film development slates with creative and financial autonomy.

Twenty awards have been made across the UK with Flickerpix the only successful applicant from Northern Ireland. With match funding from Northern Ireland Screen the award is worth around £200,000 over two years.

The awards committee at the BFI seemed to taken with Flickerpix’s low-fi stop motion style of animation exemplified by its hit BBC NI TV series On The Air, featuring strange-but-true extracts from Gerry Anderson’s Radio Ulster show. The committee noted that Flickerpix “has successfully blended stop motion characters with 2D backgrounds to great effect, in an innovative and cost-effective way. The panel was delighted by their ambition to become the Roger Corman Productions of comedy stop-motion animation movie making, creating a thriving and creative powerhouse in their Holywood studios.”

BFI first launched the Vision Awards in 2008 enabling a number of companies to scale up their business and firmly establish their international reputation through the production of critically-acclaimed and commercially successful films including The King’s Speech (produced by See-Saw Films) and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (Blueprint Pictures), in turn helping to bolster the profile of UK film on the world stage.

Buoyed by the news of their Vision Award, coupled with the recent launch of tax-relief for animation companies, and the burgeoning talent base within Northern Ireland, Flickerpix plan to make the natural progression into the production of feature length animations, in their Holywood, County Down studio. That’s Holywood with one ‘L’ – for now at least.

We are once again very proud to announce that our short film MACROPOLIS, has achieved more international film festival success!

It has won the award for the Best short animated film at the Cine-Jeune de l’aisne festival, beating eight other films to the prize.

We’ve also managed to pick up first place at the Chicago Irish Film festival, which was held in recently in March.

We are pleased to announce that we have just released MACROPHONICS – a fun and educational alphabet game for young children- for the iPad, based on our short animated film MACROPOLIS which was released to huge acclaim as part of London 2012 Cultural Olympiad.

MACROPHONICS now gives children the chance to interact with the CAT and DOG characters by watching them play with a host of interesting items they have found, like a Cupcake, a Roller Skate and a Xylophone, and learn the alphabet in the process!

This iPad free app, available to download from the iTunes App Store, features 26 unique animations, one for each letter of the alphabet, helping children understand the alphabet and the phonetic sounds that go into making up the English.

Joel Simon, the film’s creator and Creative Director of Flickerpix, is delighted that his company is making the leap into the world of App development. “Flickerpix have been producing award winning animated content for many international TV channels. With people consuming media more and more on mobile devices, we felt it was a natural progression for us to design our content for this market. We are currently developing a number of other children’s shows and we are planning the mobile strategies right from the outset”

To find out more about the MACROPHONICS App and the other downloadable content from the short film MACROPOLIS visit www.macropolis.tv

The third series of On The Air, which we animated and produced last year for BBCNI has been nominated in the ‘Best Animation’ category of this year’s Celtic Media Festival, which will be held this year in Swansea between 24-26 April.

The Celtic Media Festival is supported by broadcast, film, cultural and economic development organisations throughout the Celtic countries. The Festival is an annual three-day celebration of broadcasting, film talent and excellence from Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany.

We’re very proud to say that MACROPOLIS has won the IFTA for best animation!  It was up against some very tough competition but was awarded the prize by the judges at the event which was on Saturday 9th February and was screened on RTE ONE.

The Irish Film & Television Academy is a not-for-profit all-Ireland organisation that promotes, encourages and rewards creative excellence in film and television.

You can watch a series of short documentaries which examine the various stages involved in the making of MACROPOLIS on thespace.org – a new Arts themed website from the BBC and the Arts Council.

It features a lot of behind the scenes shots and interviews with various members of the team, including the developing the characters and how the animation models were made.

We have just designed and animated a new title sequence for Channel 4′s daily moral and ethical opinion show, 4thought.

4thought is watched by millions of viewers, and features on Channel every night after the news at 7.55pm.

Every week features a different theme relating to faith, religion and ethical issues and viewers are encouraged to leave their own comments and get involved in the debate via the 4thought website, which was designed by our friends at atto partners.

Jedward’s Big Adventure Series 2 is going out on the CBBC channel in the New Year! The whole series is being screened each day from Monday 7th January to Friday 11th January at 4.30pm. Jedward will be visiting a range of places and eras in history including cavemen in Cheddar Gorge and Vikings in Orkney, complete with fun animations made by Flickerpix!

Once again, we’re infusing animated mayhem into the second series of Jedward’s Big Adventure! The CBBC show follows the duo as they learn about various periods in history and then go head to head in a competition to see how much they remember by teaching it to some members of the public. The show is produced by Endemol UK and will air on the CBBC channel in the new year.