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Simon Pummell is a British filmmaker currently based in Amsterdam in The Netherlands, best known for directing Bodysong (2003) a documentary feature film that portrays the human life-cycle through archive footage from across a century of moving image creation. [1]
He studied Film & Television in the animation department at the Royal College of Art.
Early in his career Pummell made animated films for UK television produced by Keith Griffiths, producer of the animators the Brothers Quay. One of these films Secret Joy of Falling Angels won the Grand Prix at the Oberhausen Film Festival in 1992. In this period Pummell also made two films for the rock band Queen - a special video album for the release of Made In Heaven . [2] The clip Heaven For Everyone was an early documentary portrait of the cyborg body-artist Stelarc. The Queen video album Made In Heaven was produced by Janine Marmot for the British Film Institute. Pummell and Marmot subsequently formed a company together Hot Property Films. [3]
Bodysong (2003) is a transmedia project that included a research project to trace as much individual information and as many narratives as possible about every individual event and person portrayed in the many hundreds of archival footage clips used. In 2004 the project won an interactive BAFTA and a BIFA for best feature documentary. The Ivor Novello Award nominated soundtrack is notable as being the first film soundtrack written by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead. Paul Thomas Anderson championed the film, [4] and went on to work with Greenwood on the Oscar-winning feature There Will Be Blood. William Gibson has written an essay on the film for the British Film Institute 2010 DVD re-issue of the film. [5]
Having taught for several years at Harvard University VES as a Visiting Professor, Pummell was a Harvard Film Study Center Fellow in 2008-2009.
His second feature film Shock Head Soul (2011) was a feature-length documentary biopic depicting the insanity and Outsider Art autobiography of Daniel Paul Schreber. It premiered in Venice International Film Festival 2011. [6] An associated gallery exhibition has been shown with the film in Rotterdam International Film Festival [7] and Melbourne International Film Festival, as well as M HKA museum of Modern Art Belgium. [8]
He is a course director of the Master of Arts in Fine Art and Design: Lens-Based Media programme at the Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam. [9]
Stephen and Timothy Quay are American identical twin brothers and stop-motion animators who are better known as the Brothers Quay or Quay Brothers. They were also the recipients of the 1998 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Set Design for their work on the play The Chairs.
William Norman McLaren, LL. D. was a Scottish Canadian animator, director and producer known for his work for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). He was a pioneer in a number of areas of animation and filmmaking, including hand-drawn animation, drawn-on-film animation, visual music, abstract film, pixilation and graphical sound. McLaren was also an artist and printmaker, and explored his interest in dance in his films.
The British Independent Film Awards (BIFA) is an organisation that celebrates, supports and promotes British independent cinema and filmmaking talent in United Kingdom. Nominations for the annual awards ceremony are announced in early November, with the ceremony itself taking place in early December.
Destino is an animated short film released in 2003 by Walt Disney Animation Studios. Destino is unique in that its production originally began in 1945, 58 years before its eventual completion in 2003. The project was originally a collaboration between Walt Disney and Spanish painter Salvador Dalí, and features music written by Mexican songwriter Armando Domínguez and performed by Mexican singer Dora Luz. It was included in the Animation Show of Shows in 2003.
Aleksandr Konstantinovich Petrov is a Russian animator and animation director.
Bodysong is a 2003 BAFTA-winning documentary about human life and the human condition directed by Simon Pummell and produced by Janine Marmot.
Manick Sorcar is an Indian American artist, animator, engineer, and laserist. Sorcar is an artist in various media, including fine arts, cartoons, animations, laser arts, and world-touring stage shows with live action mixed with laser animation. His animated films, all based on children's stories from India, have won prestigious awards at international film festivals and been broadcast on the Public Broadcasting Service for 25 consecutive years. His laser arts and animation in various forms have won global awards from the International Laser Display Association.
Piet Zwart was a Dutch photographer, typographer, and industrial designer.
George Garnett Dunning (1920–1979) was a Canadian filmmaker and animator. He is best known for producing and directing the 1968 film Yellow Submarine.
Geert Paul Hendrikus Schuitema was a Dutch graphic artist. He also designed furniture and expositions and worked as photographer, film director, painter and teacher for publicity design at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague.
Ann Marie Fleming is an independent Canadian filmmaker, writer, and visual artist. She was born in Okinawa, USCAR, in 1962 and is of Chinese, Ryukyuan and Australian descent. Her film Window Horses was released in 2016.
The Willem de Kooning Academy is a Dutch academy of media, art, design, leisure and education based in Rotterdam. It was named after one of its most famous alumni, Dutch fine artist Willem de Kooning.
Kelly Warman is a British film maker and artist based in London. Working since 2005, much of her work comprises scripted video works and staged performances that explore the translation of the interior monologue into the cinematic and architectural space. Her work is often characterised by a witty and overtly theatrical approach to the subject matter.
The Piet Zwart Institute is a post-graduate institute for study and research in art, media and design based in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Named in memory of the Dutch designer Piet Zwart, it was inaugurated in 2001. The current postgraduate study program structure had been introduced earlier in 1999.
Ram Mohan was an Indian animator, title designer and design educator, who was also known as father of Indian Animation and was a veteran in the Indian animation industry, who started his career at the Cartoon Films Unit, Films Division of India, Government of India in 1956. He was chairman and chief creative officer at Graphiti Multimedia, a Mumbai-based animation company which was established in 1995, and later he also established the Graphiti School of Animation in 2006.
Petra Štefanková is a Slovak illustrator, digital artist, designer and art director. She has worked in the animation, advertising and publishing industry.
Janine Marmot is a British film producer and founder of Hot Property Films. She is best known for the BAFTA-winning documentary Bodysong and the relationship drama Kelly + Victor, which won the Outstanding British Debut BAFTA award in 2014.
Brand New-U is a 2015 science fiction, thriller film written and directed by Simon Pummell and produced by Janine Marmot. It stars Lachlan Nieboer and Nora-Jane Noone.
North of Blue is a 2018 American animated feature film directed, produced and animated by Joanna Priestley with a score by Jamie Haggerty. It is an abstract, experimental film that was inspired by the winter landscapes of the far north.
Flee is a 2021 adult animated documentary film directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen. An international co-production with Denmark, France, Norway, and Sweden, it follows the story of a man under the alias Amin Nawabi, who shares his hidden past of fleeing his home country of Afghanistan to Denmark for the first time. Riz Ahmed and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau serve as executive producers and narrators for the English-language dub version.