Titmouse To Livestream Its 5 Second Day Animation Showcase On Twitch For First Time

Titmouse will live-stream its annual 5 Second Animation Day festival on Twitch this Friday evening, replacing a theatrical screening originally scheduled in Vancouver, where many of the animation house’s 700 employees work.

It will be the first live-streamed programming by Titmouse, which started in Los Angeles and has become something of a cult favorite for animation fans for its work on offbeat series such as Big Mouth, Metalocalypse, and The Venture Bros. The company also is animating Amazon’s upcoming Vox Machina series based on Critical Role’s live-streamed Dungeons & Dragons role-playing games.

The company has been holding the 5 Second Day showcases of personal work by its artists for a dozen years now. They came out of a company tradition started in 2008 where Titmouse closed for a day, to give artists a chance to work on whatever creative project they wanted to. Over years, the artists have created increasingly ambitious, collaborative and lengthy works.

Theatrical screenings of the results have proven popular, as happened already this year in New York and Hollywood, where Titmouse also has operations. But a sold-out screening planned for the Rio Theater in Vancouver was cancelled because of COVID-19 concerns.

Though the company hopes to reschedule the Vancouver event, it also turned to Twitch to live-stream a “viewing party” featuring this year’s batch of more than 145 shorts, which are not rated by the MPAA and are intended for adult audiences. The live stream of shorts will last 90 minutes.

“We always want to make sure the artists’ films are seen by an audience,” said Titmouse president and founder Chris Prynoski. “When the challenges of this pandemic made it clear that our Vancouver screening was not going to be an option, I decided to beam it directly into the viewers’ brains! I was told that technology does not yet exist, so we are streaming it on Twitch!”

The screening will begin at 7 pm PT/10 pm ET, March 27 on Twitch. You can see some of the more than 1,000 previous shorts from 5 Second Day here.