Announcement (February 2025)

Once a year, Leicestershire, my hometown, brings the nation some laughs with the annual Leicester Comedy Festival. As part of the festival, FlipYou Comedy, an organisation that specialises in shot comedy films, founded by Mike Yeoman, who I have personally worked with, is putting on a short film screening event in a couple of Saturdays time – an event known as Popcorn Funnies.

This is why I’m especially proud to announce that one of my short films has been selected for the festival;

Straw Poll is a short animated film that I created last year as part of a filmmaking challenge set by a local filmmaker’s community. The task was to produce a 20-second short within one week relating to a specific term selected for each one of us. In this case, my title was Straw Poll and amazingly, I managed to construct it in just three/four days, since I was on vacation in Skegness for the first few days. With the help from Blender and using my passion for animation, and noting the two words “Straw” and “Poll”, I used some inspiration from the General Election that was then due to occur a few weeks after completion, and thought that if it was straws voting, which parties would they draw straws for.

And this is the logline for my film; In a world where drinking straws have their own democracy, election day isn’t about policy debates but about who can slurp up the most votes.

It therefore gives me pleasure to announce the screening of Straw Poll for the Leicester Comedy Festival of 2025. I have also recently submitted it to the UK Animation & Music Video Festival and I have a few more festivals up my sleeve.

I also look forward to seeing the rest of the films that have been accepted.