Simon Ellis is an independent filmmaker from the U.K. His production company is Bub, and Bubtowers is the 'official' and most comprehensive resource for all things Bub from 1992 to the present.

The short biography:

Simon graduated from Nottingham Trent University in 1995, specialising in Fine Art photography.  Since then his short films have received many international festival awards and have been presented in retrospective programmes at film festivals worldwide.  His short film Soft won thirty-eight prizes including the jury prize for Best International Short at the Sundance Film Festival and his first commercial recently won Best New Director at the BTA Craft Awards.  He also directed the feature film Dogging: A Love Story.

The long biography:

It would be very convenient to gush about how Simon picked up his first camera at the prodigous age of blah blah blah, but that would be fibbing, on a massive scale. All he ever wanted to do was draw, or own a chip shop. At the age of sixteen, he shot and processed his first black and white photographs. Then, throughout his subsequent art studies in Coventry, Birmingham and eventually Nottingham, he slowly drifted away from charcoal and paintbrushes to the camera as his format of choice.

His first, self-taught dabblings in film were music-based projects and he began producing his own rubbish electronic music for original soundtracks but quickly became so distracted by this that he all but stopped making films before he even got started. Producing music was also compromising the enjoyment of his favourite artform as he found himself beginning to deconstruct every piece of music that he heard.

So that was that.

The three years of his Fine Art BA were spent focusing on stills photography. There were still associations with music, photographing whatever gigs could be budged into, but having decided that this kind of work relies as much on luck as anything else (and therefore of limited satisfaction), Simon spent the vast majority of his degree working on night landscape work. During his final year he operated 16mm film and video cameras for fellow students' narrative film projects, which brought renewed interest for the moving image.

After graduation, a long, lazy summer was spent feasting on Asian cinema and a handful of short scripts were somehow written. Being a format-snob at the time, yet far too unemployed to afford anything other than videotape, enough money was scraped to ensure that the first film could be shot on Super-8mm. Given the format's somewhat temperamental nature, this meant lots of mistakes and disappointment but, fortunately, the mini-dv format was born in that same year.

Working as a volunteer at the now-defunct Intermedia in Nottingham, Simon was allowed to access camera and editing facilities by the company's facilities manager. Deciding on a moniker for his own production company, Bub (which he previously used for the aforementioned foray into making music), a plan was hatched to make at least two short films a year, this time on videotape or whatever he could get his hands on. The first was Thicker than water, which cost five pounds (and would have cost less if the person who sold him a second-hand tape had been a little more charitable). The film couldn't have been more different from the aborted Super-8 project, being shot in less than an hour with a one-person cast and crew. It went on to win a nice cash prize at the sadly-also-defunct BBC British Short Film Festival in 1997.

While freelancing as a storyboard artist for TCM and Cartoon Network, Simon met Nottingham-based animation duo Hot Knife and they were generous enough to let him use their desktop editing facilities, free of charge, whenever they were available. Discovering that affordable computers could provide independent editing facilities was an enormous factor in Simon's development as a filmmaker. It wouldn't be exaggerating to say that the move away from linear edit suites was a life-changing migration.

Jumping forward to the present, after eleven years of stubborn independence, Simon has remained in Nottingham and cannot seem to stop making short films, unfunded or otherwise. He has attended many international film festivals as both director and jury member and has enjoyed sales to international territories, plus international retrospective programmes of his films. His short drama Soft won thirty-eight awards worldwide, including Best International Short at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival. An enormous amount of good press from both industry and public audiences opened many doors to bigger things and the film's influence can arguably be seen in much current output from the UK.

“Film festivals have been my film school”

Simon has also worked as either editor or camera operator on many other projects in Nottingham's thriving filmmaking community. He has, perhaps inevitably, dipped his toe into the music video industry a few times but has remained successfully undistracted by it. He directed episodes of the MTV comedy series Fur TV and directed the feature film Dogging: A Love Story, alongside an assortment of other short projects.