User:Simon Pummell

Simon Pummell works with moving images across different cinematic forms – feature film, animation film, artist’s television, and large-scale projections in galleries and live theatre – winning many international awards, and film festival career retrospectives.

He’s created numerous animated films and artist’s television commissions for UK broadcasters: combining age old, ‘primitive’ animation techniques with high tech computer generated animation, and with live action. He’s also created MTV idents, and two sections of the portmanteau feature film Made in Heaven for the rock band Queen.

His most recent feature film project Bodysong received critical acclaim and won a BAFTA (British Academy Award); a BIFA (British Independent Film Award); and an Ivor Novello nomination (for the soundtrack by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead) among other awards.

In 2005/6 he received a UK National Endowment for Science, Technology & Art ‘Dream Time Fellowship’ to research new media & cinema futures.

For 2007 – 2009 he was a visiting lecturer at Dept. of VES Harvard University and a Harvard Film Study Centre Fellow 2008/9 researching new digital animation techniques.

www.pummell.com

Current Research and Production

Drawing in Time: A practice-based research project resulting in a series of moving image gallery installations

Supported by the Piet Zwart Lectorate Research Centre

An ongoing series of moving image installations: Drawings in Time. This project loops together digital animation processes with the manual, gestural, and analogue techniques of traditional figure drawing to develop new moving-image forms. The resulting looped moving image sequences are designed to be viewed in a gallery context: as drawings that develop over time. The methods by which they are created are part of a sustained research project, into the extension of the grammars and procedures of drawing into digital moving images, initiated with a Harvard Film Study Centre Fellowship 2008-2009.

Shock Head Soul: animated documentary: writer and director

A Submarine Rotterdam & Hot Property Production The production is a UK/Netherlands co-production with financed attached from: Wellcome Trust Major Arts Award UK, the Netherlands Film Fund and support from the The Harvard Film Study Centre. Project is due to shoot in January 2010: a feature length documentary that dramatizes the life story and private cosmology of Daniel Paul Schreber, the psychotic writer, who was raised within bizarre and punitive systems of training and discipline developed by his father. Schreber’s book Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken (Memoirs of My Nervous Illness 1903) was made famous by Freud’s critical reading. The project was developed in collaboration with psychoanalyst Helen Taylor-Robinson.

Slow Motion Explosion: fiction feature film: writer and attached to direct. A Hot Property Production. Project currently casting: the screenplay developed for the UK Film Council with further support from the European MEDIA Programme. A contemporary ghost story set in London’s meat markets. Six sets of memories, six versions of the circumstances of a man’s death: a spiral of flashback narratives that play out utterly differently. Each story might or might not be true – but they cannot ALL be true.

Brand New-U: fiction feature film: writer and attached to direct.

A Submarine Rotterdam & Hot Property Production Screenplay currently in development for the UK Film Council. Project selected for Power to the Pixel conference London Film Festival 2009 & Cinemart International Film Festival Rotterdam 2010. Brand New-U Brand New-U re-arranges the barest elements of a thriller into the looping logic of a nightmare, because we must all kill our old selves to create ourselves anew. Desperate? Unhappy? The company BRAND NEW-U offers a new identity, a life better than your own. The only price for a new life? A single killing.

Bodysong: feature documentary & website to be re-released as a British Film Institute collectors edition DVD & book A BIFA and BAFTA winning project: a depiction of an archetypal life, told using found footage taken from across the last 100 years of cinema, scored by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead. Paired with a website that tells more than 600 stories of the individual archive clips within the films.

Interview Recently Simon Pummell has been interviewed by the people of APEngine about the Piet Zwart Institute. You can find the complete interview here.