Whitby animation house Owl House Studios has picked up awards for Best Animated Short Film and Best Animated Music Video at the 2024 New York Animation Film Awards for its music video to accompany Steven Wilson’s track Beautiful Scarecrow.
Owl House is a Whitby-based film animation company, and founder Jess Cope lives in nearby Burniston village. The proudly North Yorkshire company has consistently managed to win top film
awards for music artists such as Metallica, Passenger, Avantasia, Opeth and Steven Wilson.
Founding partner Jess Cope has worked with Tim Burton on such films as Frankenweenie, as well as the TV series Postman Pat and The Clangers.
Beautiful Scarecrow was produced by Owl House in October 2023 for a new track by prog rock artist Wilson. The track is part of his latest album, The Harmony Codex which was also released in 2023.
The idea behind the video is based around a situation where a highly contagious disfiguring disease has mysteriously appeared in a world dominated by a shady corporation, creating a forced separation between those who are infected and those who are not.
It follows an inventor, forced to hide behind a mask to shield his disfigurement from the society above ground. A victim of the contamination, who has only an old stuffed toy rabbit for company, he is fascinated by the world above and makes scavenging trips to the surface to gather artefacts of a world he cannot ever know, or be part of. One such trip leads to a fateful encounter with someone from his past and a great personal loss.
