TASK 3.4 : Biography of Simon Ellis

Biography of Simon Ellis

Simon Ellis is a British director and the winner of the international Jury prize at the Sundance Festival. The nominations of BAFTA, BIFA and European Film Awards for short films. He was born in Coventry and studied in Nottingham focusing on still photography. After studying about Fine Art Photography, Simon decides to look at the camera format and became a camera operator for a group of film students; He then wrote pages of scripts and began working as a volunteer at the Intermedia Film and Video in Nottingham giving him access to cameras and editing software’s. He sometimes freelances as a storyboard artist and a graphic designer learning his filmmaking projects while working as a camera operator or an editor doing short films in Nottingham.

Simon Ellis has received numerous awards for his short video and has directed music video and commercials. He is known for his genre of diversity, real-life, drama, comedy and animation. He’s created 11 short videos, ‘Jam Today’ is his most recent video made in 2011. One of his successful films ‘Soft’ was inspired by Simon Ellis real life events during his school days in Coventry, when one of his classmates got beaten up at school and his father looked on. Ellis wants to show his life experiences on screen so we know what world we live in and we still have the same problem for years. What goes on screen doesn’t only show real life events but shows us as a nation and how we are.

Quote - ‘’ I came across a short film recently which blew everything else I had seen that week out of the water. After it was over, there was no question of doing anything other than lying on the sofa with a cushion on my face, whimpering in fear and paranoia. 'Soft' is shocking and violent, and ingeniously, intimately upsetting in a way I can only compare to the controversial scenes in Gaspar Noé's Irréversible. The film reminded me of an essay I read by the late Alexander Walker about Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange: that the film was not merely about violence but about something deeper, darker, more unsayable: a fear of our children, and older people's fear and hatred of the young’’. (Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian)