$12,000 SYFY Honor Black History Animated Video Project

Calling all Black animators and filmmakers! SYFY’s looking to produce a series of short vignettes that celebrate and amplify Black voices, stories, and experiences. We’re open to any medium, including live-action.

SYFY is the Alpha and the Omega of genre. They’ve got everything from cyberpunk sci-fi to futuristic fantasy and the boldest, bloodiest horror films you’ve ever seen. Superheroes, cyborgs, monsters, mashups, crossovers, comics – whoever you are, whatever genre you dig, SYFY’s got you. Every month, SYFY partners with different genre fans who work as artists, animators, designers, and directors, and gives them an opportunity to express their own love of genre in different ways, with an artistic and incredibly cool TV spot.

Now, although 2021 seems lightyears away, February’s Black History Month is on the horizon, and for this project SYFY wants to spotlight Black animators and filmmakers who can produce a short video vignette that will explore and honor the Black experience in genre. While Black History Month will serve as a creative launching pad for these pieces, SYFY plans to amplify these stories beyond the month of February as well, so they’re looking looking for videos that explore Black voices, stories, and experiences more broadly.

Think about the genre moments, archetypes, characters, or scenes that made you fall in love with sci-fi, superheroes, fantasy, or horror, and give them your own spin. Represent your community, your family, your unique POV, and amplify black voices by creating something that really feels like a reflection of who you are, and what you want to see. You can also choose to use genre tropes and character types as a way to illustrate your own personal stories – SYFY is open to many different creative directions.

For your pitch, we’d recommend you show off your past work, and then submit several different narrative ideas for your video. If you’re greenlit by SYFY, we’ll work with you to develop ONE of your ideas during the pre-production process. Also, SYFY’s open to live action approaches this month. We understand live action is hard given the current circumstances, so we’d recommend you keep the scope of any live-action pretty contained if you go that route, and keep things a little more Lo-Fi. As a reminder, all work MUST be original, and should NOT include or reference existing IP or characters.