Requiem for Romance wins audience choice award at the Athens Animation Festival in upstate New York! In the lush, beautiful, small town village of Athens NY, two hours north of NYC, Lisa Thomas, line producer at Augenblick studios, has founded a charming animation festival with the mission of showcasing films on the human condition.

Located in the space that used to be an old opera house above the Crossroads brewery, the open space screening concept was an ideal venue for the independent animation filmmaker as the organizers made sure to set up booths inside the screening space to display artwork, prints, DVDs, comic books and post-cards.

The community of Athens was extremely supportive in attending the festival, making it a packed, engaged and vibrant full-house. During the screening of my film Requiem for Romance I really felt that it was very well received and appreciated. Lisa Thomas announced that the Audience Choice Award was an overwhelming consensus.

Shout outs to the other two award winners The Hungry Boy by Jake Nelson & Cem Kurtulus and Tax Dollars at War by Chris Fontaine. The Hungry Boy won Best Animation Award at the festival, and the rest of Jake's animation work is pretty brilliant: http://jakenelsonart.com/animation/.

The Athens Animation Festival was so awesome and the most pro-artist festival I've ever attended. They took care of all of the details for the artists, providing a large merch table for the animation filmmakers and even Brooklyn based comic artists who came up to support the festival. Lisa Thomas, the founder, and many of the key organizers of the festival work full-time at Augenblick studios. In contrast to the commercial animation industry, they started this festival with the expressed purpose of having a safe venue for deeply meaningful animation and animated films with a social message.