“Sweaty Eyeballs” was born out of a Baltimore summer. The humid words hung in the air when animator Phil Davis, M.F.A. ’07, imaging and digital arts, was putting his plans into place in summer 2012 for the first edition of the animated film festival that now bears the moniker.

“I liked how they sounded, they felt like a memorable name,” Davis says. “And after watching 92 animated shorts in a weekend, your eyes will feel like they’ve been through a workout!”

Headshot of Phil Davis, M.F.A. ’07, courtesy of Towson University.

Davis, now a professor at Towson University’s Department of Art + Design, is an animator whose own hand-drawn, stop motion and digital animations have screened around the world. “Animation has the ability to tap into so many human emotions, it’s part of why I love it so much—its expressive potential is boundless,” he says. 

The 13^th edition of Sweaty Eyeballs runs October 18 – 20 at several Baltimore venues, including MICA’s Falvey Hall and Towson’s Van Bokkelen Hall Theatre. The festival showcases 92 short films from around the world, featuring four international competition blocks, as well as a Baltimore showcase that runs on the opening night, which will feature numerous works from UMBC creators.

From its inception through 2018, the Sweaty Eyeballs Animation Festival existed as a one-night-only invitational offering a diverse array of animated narrative, documentary, music video, and experimental work that pushed the boundaries of art, craft, and technology. Over the years, the festival partnered with theaters across Baltimore, including the Creative Alliance, The Charles and The Parkway, as well as theaters run by local Baltimore universities. In 2019, Sweaty Eyeballs emerged as a full-fledged film festival in its own right, and its steady growth continues.

A platform for world-class programming

While submissions to the festival span the continents, many of them originate close to home. From UMBC’s visual arts program, recent graduate Carter Gray ’24 and senior Mariel Chavez are featured in the Baltimore Showcase Competition, among many other faculty and staff. “Carter Gray’s film Tempus is a really cool short animation that has an environmental bent, and it’s basically the history of the world and how humans are kind of destroying the earth,” says Davis. “Mariel Chavez’s The Beautiful Pain of Trichotillomania is very short, beautifully animated drawings on paper.”

UMBC faculty and staff with work featured in the 2024 Sweaty Eyeballs lineup include Tima Aflitunov (Earthlings), Jim Doran (Magus Incognito), Eric Millikin (The Dance of the Nain Rouge), and SKRFF by Corrie Francis Parks and Daniel Nuderscher. (Parks, an associate professor of visual arts, also serves this year as curator of a concurrent gallery exhibition, Sweaty Eyeballs: Animation Adjacent).

“Corrie’s new film is amazing,” says Davis, “It’s sort of deconstructing graffiti art on this wall that’s had graffiti on it for years and years and years. And Eric Milliken’s is a really mesmerizing piece utilizing these custom-made AI training sets to create imagery.”

Expanding animation

Festival programming will also include a young audiences program featuring kid-appropriate animation, as well as an animation workshop for kids.

Los Angeles-based animator and production designer Miguel Jiron, who worked as head-of-story on the Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse movies, will give an industry talk at the festival on October 19. Jiron will also offer a Story Development Masterclass at UMBC on October 18.

In addition to the more traditional theatrical screenings presented, this year Sweaty Eyeballs has expanded to include a cornucopia of free events and exhibitions.

Sweaty Eyeballs: Animation Adjacent, the exhibition curated by Corrie Francis Parks, opened September 13 and runs through October 20, features artists from the Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., metropolitan areas, spanning aspects of animation from the earliest forms of animation such as praxinoscopes and zoetropes—mechanical devices that created the illusion of motion—through modern digital techniques.

A still from UMBC production coordinator Tima Aflitunov’s animation “Earthlings.”

“I wanted to highlight the ways that animation can stand outside the picture and in different formats, and show the approaches of different artists who incorporate animation into their practice,” Parks says. ”There are a lot of artists practicing ‘expanded animation,’ that expands outward in different modes and mediums, work that necessarily needs to be in a different space.”

An animator who has exhibited her work around the globe, Parks notes that Sweaty Eyeballs stands out as a unique event in U.S. film programming. “I’ve really been thankful for Sweaty Eyeballs,” she says. “There are few other cities in the United States where you would get such good animation programming in an actual festival devoted to animation.”

Numerous UMBC-affiliated artists are featured in Animation Adjacent’s programming, including Jim Doran, an AOK Library staff member who presents an assemblage of fragmental stories contained in small containers, and Kelley Bell, associate professor of visual arts, whose installation Enchanted Jangle is the epic cardboard fort your five-year-old self dreamed of. Adjunct professor Kat Navarro taps family history and diasporic longing to present The view from my childhood window.

Jiayin Shen and Eric Dyer as Duo Kinetica. They combine zoetropes with a live piano score.

The show includes two interactive, generative installations by Timothy Nohe, visual arts professor, and McCoy Chance ’19, music technology and media and communication studies. “Both artists use sound translated into electronic signals as the catalyst for animation,” says Parks, “and invite the viewer to be the ‘animator’ by activating the works with their voice.”

On October 11, Area 405 will host a free Animation Adjacent Variety Show and Film Screening, featuring eclectic performances and short animations by exhibition artists pushing the boundaries of animation as an artform. One featured act will include Baltimore musicians Bonnie Lander and Shelly Purdy interacting with Nohe’s Entr’acte-Interact.

Closing the festival on October 20, UMBC visual arts professor Eric Dyer—named by Creative Capital as “The Modern Master of the Zoetrope”—will offer a live performance with Jiayin Shen as Duo Kinetica, combining zoetropes with a live piano score.