How Two Students Reclaimed Their Stolen Short Film
It sounds like the plot of a screenplay, but it happened to two Berlin film students in real life. Moritz Henneberg and Julius Drost had created an animated short film for their final project at university. "Butty" tells the tale of a household robot that gets kicked out when it can 't do its job properly.
It sounds like a screenplay, but it really happened to two Berlin film students. Moritz Henneberg and Julius Drost created an animated short for their final project called Butty, about a household robot discarded when it fails at its job. After they posted it to YouTube the film went viral and they began submitting it to festivals — only to discover it had already been entered under another name.
A US student, Samuel Felinton, had downloaded their upload, made only minor edits, stripped the credits, retitled the work T-130 and claimed it as his own. He won several festival prizes and started to build a reputation in the United States. Legal counsel told Henneberg and Drost that suing would be costly and slow, so the two chose a different path: they investigated Felinton and turned the episode into a new film.
They studied his vlogs and online presence, trying to understand rather than simply react. With a small crew and a colleague from New York posing as a documentarian interested in young animators, they traveled to Morgantown, West Virginia, to meet him. They planned for a range of reactions — contrition, anger, or flight — but Felinton remained eerily calm. He told them he had shortened and “improved” the piece, said that change had made it successful, and offered to repay prize money. After the formal interview they even shared a barbecue and played basketball, a mix of normalcy and denial that unsettled the Germans and deepened their curiosity.
Public response was divided. Some argued they should have pursued legal punishment; others praised their creative, nonlitigious handling. Henneberg has said the theft didn’t feel personal in the same way it might if a major studio had taken their work, and they deliberately avoided publicly humiliating Felinton.
The confrontation became the subject of their feature documentary, Der talentierte Mister F., a deliberate nod to The Talented Mr. Ripley and its themes of identity and deception. Felinton later returned trophies and handed back some money, while festival organizers largely distanced themselves, noting awards had been issued and that the filmmakers would need to sort out the dispute.
Roland Emmerich invested in an international release of the documentary, increasing the chance of wider exposure in the US. After the film premiered in Germany in October 2025, attention to the original animation rose again. Henneberg and Drost reuploaded Butty to YouTube, this time with proper credits and a line thanking Samuel Felinton.
The filmmakers point out that the theft was possible because their 2023 upload allowed downloads. They don’t regret posting the short online — the alternative might have been never showing it at all. Their advice to other young creators is pragmatic: be aware of the risks when you put work online, don’t be discouraged if something goes wrong, and consider creative, public ways to assert your authorship rather than assuming litigation is the only option. What began as a case of plagiarism ultimately became material for another film — an unexpected twist that brought renewed attention to the original work.
Originally published in German.