The Animation Planet film festival screened 27 animated shorts to a crowd of viewers, some in standing room only. Sophie Burchell / The Forecaster

A crowd of over 100 people laughed, sighed and ferociously clapped Saturday, Sept. 28, as they watched 27 short animated films as part of the second annual Animation Planet Film Festival. The event aimed to create community for animators from Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, and give local animators of all experience levels an opportunity to share their work and expand their understanding of the medium.

“Hopefully they take away from it the magic of animation, the possibilities of an animation, how valuable of an art form it is, and how much work it is,” said Josie Colt, an organizer of the event.

The event was organized by Colt and Shawn Brewer, two Portland-based multimedia artists who met through art events at Congress Square Park and wanted to bring local animators together. In addition to the film screening, the event at O’Maine Studios included an artist market, puppetry and projections, workshops and interactive demonstrations from animators, and concessions.

“I really felt a need for community as an animator in Portland, and also just in New England in general. I didn’t really know a lot of people that were engaging in the medium,” said Brewer.

“I think that we want it to be an opportunity for people who maybe have always wanted to try animation, or do it as a hobby, or have animation experience but only do it in a commercial setting, to try something creative and have a place to share with other people,” he said.

The inaugural Animation Planet took place last summer in Congress Square Park in partnership with the nonprofit Friends of Congress Square Park, which facilitates free events in the square year-round. While the outdoor venue attracted passersby, the activities that could be offered outside were limited and the festival had to be pushed to the rain date.

For this year’s festival, arts venue SPACE granted Animation Planet a Kindling Fund grant to host the event indoors and offer prizes to winners selected by a jury of Portland artists. Prizes were awarded in the categories of two-dimensional traditional/hand drawn, two-dimensional digital, stop-motion, mixed media and jurors’ choice. In addition to monetary prizes, winners were presented with an artful mounted rubber duck spray-painted silver.

A still from “Umwelt,” a 3-minute animated film by Elliot Shafnacker that was screened at Animation Planet. Contributed / Photo by Elliot Shafnacker

Elliot Shafnacker’s film “Umwelt” was awarded the jurors’ choice award. While Shafnacker currently lives in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, they submitted to the festival during their senior year at Burlington College in Vermont. The film was a senior project for their visual arts studies.

Their 3-minute film explores the sensory worlds of non-human creatures and was created with hand-drawn animation on paper alongside three-dimensional sculptures and is the first work of Shafnacker’s to be selected for a festival. They hope to one day work for an animation studio and currently animate in their free time, and in the meantime draw inspiration from events like Animation Planet.

“I have my idea of what animation is like, and that always gets blown apart when I see the materials and approaches other people bring to it,” said Shafnacker.

Sophie Davis and Luke Fatora are two musicians from Rockland whose film “1492” was shown at Animation Planet. The married team both play violin in a quartet and regularly project visuals behind them when the group performs. After taking an animation class at Maine Media Workshops, the couple created a visual accompaniment to a musical performance using stop-motion animation.

Their 3-minute film is about capitalism and colonialism, the couple said. They created it using wire stick figures and household objects.

Wire figures are depicted cutting down trees and finding oil in the animated short “1492.” Sophie Burchell / The Forecaster

“We’re also really interested in using really sparse materials. Trying to create something that is really evocative and clear, but with using as little as possible,” said Fatora.

Unless an animator is employed in an animation studio, creating animations is usually not very social, said Davis.

“In our case, we’re kind of locked up in a dark room, moving little things around, and it feels like a very kind of individual, isolating process. And ultimately, I think sharing this work is about sharing it with community and with other people,” said Davis.

“I feel like being really new to this world ourselves, it felt like a really exciting opportunity to get to know other animators and just to see people’s work and have it screened, not watching it on a phone or on a computer screen, but the way it’s intended to be watched,” she said.

Colt and Brewer hope to both continue Animation Planet annually and begin hosting more events throughout the year to foster the animation community in Portland.

“I think that animators, maybe particularly … younger animators, or early in their career, might feel … a need to leave Maine or need to leave the Northeast for more, like, animation opportunities or access to community within this field,” said Colt.

“It would be cool to allow animators to feel like there’s a … home for them here, and you don’t need to leave if you don’t want to,” she said.