You may recognise Sam Cotton’s work from Ani-Mate, his winning entry in the inaugural Screen Forever Got A Minute? competition. In the short, two friends named Salty and Peps get separated in a tragic yet hilarious set of circumstances. The TikTok is made in a hybrid style of real-life footage edited with hand-drawn animations (i.e. eyes and arms on a pepper shaker), and dubbed over with Sam’s own voice work.
The short currently has over 272,000 views after just five days of being on the platform. That’s nothing to sneeze at – particularly since TikTok’s algorithm can be a difficult beast to tame. To get just 5 seconds of fame, creators have to forego intuitive tagging and categorising, and instead caption their videos with whatever hashtag is trending at the time. With only two tags: ‘fyp’ (meaning For You Page, the platform’s signature dashboard) and ‘couple’ (referring to the titular seagulls), its six-figure reach is impressive.
