For the team at Short of the Week, one of the things we pride ourselves on is our influence in helping filmmakers progress their careers. Building an audience over the last 10+years, our viewership includes fans, filmmakers and industry types, meaning we can not only help short films rack up millions of views, we can also help their creators make important connections within the sector. Saying all this, some filmmakers don’t need the help of gatekeepers to find a fanbase – case in point, today’s featured director Victoria Vincent (aka Vewn).

With a successful Patreon campaign helping to fund her work, Vewn has built an audience of over one-million subscribers on her YouTube channel (plus hundreds of thousands on her Instagram), with her films regularly breaking the million views mark (her most popular, Bobo the Monkey, currently has 12m views) on the platform. It’s fair to say she’s carved out her own space in the animation world and obviously doesn’t need the help of outlets like Short of the Week to find an audience. Does that mean we shouldn’t feature her work? Of course not!

Catopolis, her latest and longest short so far, is the story of a cat called Penny and her run-ins with a mysterious organisation who offer her work as what appears to be some kind of fighter, after she is fired from her current job for unacceptable behaviour. It’s a strange narrative (there’s a kind of Fight Club vibe at its core – but with cats) set in an equally bizarre universe where every aspect of live is captured and replayed for television and masked soldiers walk the streets dishing out justice. 

As the narrative unfurls, events getting stranger and stranger, Vewn compliments her off-kilter storyline with the same warped, lurid aesthetic and disorientating skewed perspective we saw in her previous short Twins in Paradise. Although her style isn’t exactly what you’d call original, it’s unmistakably her own – you can usually tell a Vewn film from the thumbnail alone – and again she has to be complimented for finding her niche area in the animation world and cultivating an audience.

Catopolis is Vewn’s 16th release on her YouTube channel and looks like becoming her 15th film to reach the one-million views mark. Of course, success isn’t all about views and it depends what Vincent wants to do next with her career. We’ve already seen her work with Netflix on their We The People series, so maybe TV is in her future? Either way, she’ll still have her dedicated audience, who seem to have a real hunger for her particular brand of animation…and that’s something she should be extremely proud of.