Delegates to the Cannes Film Festival will be able to view a short animated film created by a Wolverhampton company backed by the Advantage Creative Fund.

Screenburn, set up by three artists 18 months ago, received £25,000 of ACF funding last year, and received assistance on a business plan and office move to the Wolverhampton Science Park.

Screenburn offers computer-generated animation and special effects to computer games developers, TV, film and video producers.

Its promotional short film Little Angel will be shown at some of the biggest film festivals in Europe, including Cannes, after winning a UK animation competition organised by Hewlett Packard and the Canadian software company Alias, which worked on the film Lord of the Rings.

The film received its premiere at a gathering last week of many of the fund's other investments.

Stuart Barnecutt, of Screenburn, said: "It's been an incredible 12 months. We started with nothing but the ACF investment enabled us to go out and make contacts and market the company."

Peter Tomlinson, the former Saga Radio managing director who chairs the fund, said the gathering was to celebrate the achievements of those the fund had backed.

ACF is one of half a dozen schemes backed by the regional development agency Advantage West Midlands and has some £5 million to invest in the region's burgeoning creative industries.

Managing director David Edmonds said that the fund had now invested in ten businesses, totalling some £840,000.

"We expect to complete another three in the next six weeks," he added.

AWM deputy chairman Norman Price explained that the creative industries were identified as a growth area for the region.

The fund aimed to plug a gap that is not covered by commercial financiers, such as 3is.

"Creative industries have only their ideas and intellect to offer, which is often not what the conventional financiers are looking to back," he added.

As chairman of the newlyformed regional stock exchange, he hoped that one day some of ACF's investments would come looking for further finance which it could broker.