Award-winning “Ninety-five Senses” Produced by Professor and Alumni via Salt Lake Film Society Grant
This March, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will decide if “Ninety-five Senses,” a film spear-headed by a BYU TMA professor and six TMA alumni, will win an Oscar for Best Animated Short. The short film has already won multiple awards including an audience award, special jury awards, general short awards and a character award. The Academy announced the “Ninety-Five Senses” nomination on January 23, 2024. The awards ceremony will take place on March 10, 2024.
The film is “endearing and heartbreaking,” according to RogerEbert.com and “explores regret, memory and repentance more successfully than some feature films,” according to Awards Daily.
It looks at life from the warm perspective of a character whose life is cut short after years of feeling “leashed and kenneled up” in a “cruelly smooth” environment.
Kelly Loosli, an animator in BYU’s Department of Design, got involved in the project as a Utah Film Society board member. He said the short began with a MAST grant to “promote training of artists and leverag[e] contacts to help people get into the industry of filmmaking.” Several BYU alumni were involved in the project as well. BYU Media Arts alumni Jared and Jerusha Hess directed the film; Chris Bowman and Hubbel Palmer, also TMA alumni, were writers on the project; and two of the animators on the film, KC Toby and Michael Grover, graduated from BYU's animation program. Loosli (Director of the BYU Center for Animation) was executive producer.
The film can be viewed on Documentary+.