In the Genie-nominated animated short Bingo, freakish circus folk in a barren setting repeatedly insist that a quiet guy minding his own business is Bingo the clown.

Chris Landreth, Alias|Wavefront senior animator and director of the five-minute piece, gleaned inspiration for the bizarre short from a play he saw a couple of years ago called Disregard This Play, produced in Chicago by the Neo-Futurists theater group as part of a one-hour performance of 30 short plays. Filmed segments of the stage production appear for a few brief seconds at the beginning of the short.

Landreth began work on Bingo in the summer of ’97, completing the film a year later.

One of the reasons for making the film was to test Alias|Wavefront’s new 3D animation and special effects software, Maya, which was in development at the time and allowed Landreth to create obscure, yet realistic, characters with true-to-life facial expressions.

Bingo is based on the idea that when a person is told something consistently they will start to believe it. The film opens with a man – the only relatively normal-looking human in the story – sitting quietly when he is approached by a cigarette-smoking clown who greets him with ‘Hi Bingo.’

The man tells the clown he is not Bingo, but the clown ignores him, and with each mention of the name Bingo, the clown grows larger. Meanwhile, out of the other corner of the screen comes a skinny, long-legged female-type character. She strikes a pose and yells ‘Music please’ into her megaphone.

At that, the tunes begin to play and the background is transformed from dark and dreary to bright and colorful. Images surround the man, and a clown, balancing a piano while riding a bike, pedals around the ring.

When the lanky lady in black and white says ‘Stop the music,’ all color and lights disappear. An abnormal-looking small girl with oversized eyes and magic balloons which pop and inflate continuously, approaches the man, tells him, ‘He’s coming to check on your progress,’ gives him a sweet smile, then transforms into a hideous creature.

And if this isn’t strange enough, the next outlandish creature in the ring is Bill The Money Guy, a bald creature with 17 arms sporting sunglasses and covered in cash.

Music lights and color come and go, characters appear and disappear, all the while calling the man Bingo, and just when he finally believes he is the famous ‘Bingo the Clown-o,’ a voice comes out of nowhere and says, ‘Next please,’ dismissing the tormented soul.

Bingo picked up the Media Prize for Best Computer Animation at the Ottawa International Animation Festival. It was selected as the grand finale of the Electronic Theatre at Siggraph ’98 and was awarded the Silver Plaque at the Chicago International Film Festival.