Over the last several years, Ben has experimented on a number of occasions with short film and animation. He’s been a fan of animation for as long as he can remember, an is an avid fan of the work of Pixar Animation Studios and the British Aardman Animation in particular. Studying both Media Production and Digital Media, Ben was introduced to they key concepts of creative animation early on and brought his passions for script writing and radio together to create something more visual on the screen.
Brian the Lion (Pilot, 2015)
As his Masters level dissertation project, Ben wrote and produced a pilot episode of a new children’s TV show called ‘Brian the Lion’. The short animation was designed to mix the traditional tropes of British children’s TV with the icon style of the public information video (think, Stop! Look! Listen! and Think! Hedgehog Road Safety). The genesis for this idea came from a discussion with a group of international students where the idea was raised of a creating a tongue-in-cheek, yet informative video for new international students arriving in the UK, one that focused directly on the unique customs and mannerisms that are so much a part of the British identity.
The Cheese Thief (LiME, 2012)
Back in 2012, Ben and his Dreaming Tiger Productions co-producer Hannah, were invited to write and produce a short film for the Lincolnshire Media Education charity (LiME) which would be shown at a short festival for school children across the county. There were several briefs for this work, and the team opted to choose the subject of Modern Foreign Languages and produce a film that would promote this valuable area of the curriculum to children of primary school age. The result, is a short film called ‘The Cheese Thief’ produced in stop motion animation and focusing on the story of an excited collection of kitchen utensils and food items that suddenly come to life. Each character in the piece speaks a different language, from Spanish, to Portuguese and even Welsh! In fact, for the Welsh language Ben sourced a father and son team who recorded their parts in Cardiff working to a rough draft of the final film.