Animation for the annual Christmas card at work www.bottletop.co.uk/merryxmas
A beautiful winter’s scene, a cross dressing Father Christmas and a pooping reindeer. Made using pre 1923 vintage graphics from graphicsfairy.blogspot.com.
Merry Christmas!
Recently myself and Ben Wigley made a little film to celebrate Broadway Cinema’s 21st birthday.
Happy Birthday Broadway ‘ Cake Film’ HD from Benjamin Wigley on Vimeo.
Broadway had commisioned Swirls Bakery to create a cake in the shape of a cinema seat to celebrate their birthday and asked Ben if he’d make a short “making of” to be played before films that week and in their cafe bar, online etc. We knew we’d like to incorporate film symbology and scenes along with the baking of the cake so decided to rip off homage the work of Vincent Bousserez & Slinkachu. They both use tiny figures of people in real world environments and we thought this would be a nice way to incorporate some iconic film scenes in amongst the baking of the cake.
Once we’d decided on the film scenes we’d like to incorporate/the ones we could figure out how to fit into a load of flour, sugar and cake, the little model figures were purchased online from a model railway website and cut, melted, glued and painted to resemble the characters they were representing.
The actual cake wasn’t to be made for another couple of weeks so we filmed the baking of a mock cake and miniature scenes at my flat (apparently because I have big, bright windows but I suspect because Ben didn’t want his place caked in flour) using a DSLR and a lot of flour. Ben’s wife Megan came over and we filmed her going through the stages of mixing the ingredients and baking a chocolate cake (as we knew the base of the final cake would be chocolate). We then spent most of the day balancing monkeys and little men amongst bits of cake and ingredients to try and represent, as closely as we could, the scenes from the various films.
Animation for the annual Christmas card at work www.bottletop.co.uk/merrychristmas
A series of cheerful Christmas knitted jumpers come to life. Merry Christmas!! 
My friend Benjamin Wigley has recently completed a short documentary focusing on strange objects the fashion designer Paul Smith has been receiving for the last 20 years.
Read more about the film and watch the trailer at www.artdocs.co.uk
See more of Ben’s work at www.benjaminwigley.co.uk
Finally got around to updating my website and showreel, my previous one was looking dated, it was entirely in Flash and the content was ancient so I thought it was about time for an overhaul.
This is only bare bones at the moment, I’m hoping to add a more thorough work section with information on various projects, and if I think it’s interesting enough possibly a couple of walk through/tutorials on bits and pieces.
I’ve also moved the blog into WordPress from Blogger in an attempt to make me update it more regularly, as you can see from the last post my time between posting is usually pretty generous.
Back in October I spent a bizarre weekend making an odd, abstract horror with my friends Ben and Paul. As it never got entirely finished that weekend here’s a fun montage to give the general mood.
The story was a bit convoluted but can be summarised thus: Ben and myself put a sack on Paul’s head and beat him up in a dirty old chicken shed in the dark, genius I’m sure you’ll agree.
Helped my friend Ben out with some stop motion bits for his documentary about the Vissarion Christ, some nutty bloke in Siberia who thinks God is his Dad (I don’t think he is, but you never know, he does have a beard though so perhaps).
We weren’t going for photo realism (just as well), more of a Michel Gondry thing. We pinned up a bluescreen, layed out a load of plastic sheet and then covered Ben’s floor with loads of potting soil and clods of dirty old ground and grass, complete with several thousand hitch-hiking ants. Rocks borrowed from the garden in front of Ben’s flats covered in flour created a mountain range/pile of rocks covered in flour.
Back in May last year I took part in the second Britfilms 24 hour film challenge with my friends Ben Wigley and Paul Allen. The rules were the same as the one we did the previous November, shoot, edit and submit a 3 minute film in 24 hours, including a provided item in each scene to prove nothing had been shot prior, this time the object was a t-shirt.
The film was shortlisted and screened at Cineworld in Nottingham.
Recently took part in the 24 hour film challenge run by Britfilms with my friends Ben Wigley and Paul Thompson. We shot, edited and submitted the final 3 minute short on DVD in one very long day, starting at 11am and finishing at 7am the following morning. Due to it being Autumn we only had daylight till around 4pm, so spent much of the day running around squeezing in the shots we needed before it went dark. The time limit was exasperated by us having to shoot on a bus, build a free standing door and frame, shoot many of the shots twice for later use with visual effects and fend off tramps shouting “action” and urine soaked homeless women repeatedly asking the time and asking if we were surveyors. The film was shortlisted and screened at Cineworld, Nottingham.