Simon Ellis is an independent film director 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.

It would be just splendid to gush about how Simon picked up his first camera at the prodigous age of blah blah blah, but that would be yawn-off rubbish.

He started taking black and white photographs at the age of sixteen and, throughout his art studies in Coventry, Birmingham and Nottingham respectively, 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 electronic music for original scores, quickly becoming 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:

"I found myself deconstructing every piece of music that I heard"

So that was that.

After relocating to Nottingham for a Fine Art BA, the next three years were spent focusing on stills photography. There were still associations with music, photographing whatever gigs could be budged into, including several stints with a largely unknown Pulp. Ultimately deciding that this kind of photography relies more on luck than anything else, and therefore of limited satisfaction, Simon spent the vast majority of his three years at university focusing on night landscape work. During his final year he operated 16mm film and video cameras for fellow students' film projects, which brought renewed interest for the moving image.

After graduation there was a long, lazy summer of feasting on Asian cinema and, somewhere in there, a handful of short scripts were 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 for Simon, the mini-dv format was introduced in that same year.

Working as a volunteer at the now-defunct Intermedia in Nottingham, Simon was able to access camera and editing facilities and, setting up his own production company, Bub, a plan was hatched to make at least two short films a year. 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 no cast or 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, a Nottingham-based animation duo (Hot Knife) were then generous enough to let Simon use their non-linear editing facilities (which were a novelty at the time), free of charge, whenever they were available. This was a key factor in Simon's development, in terms of discovering that affordable computers could provide independent editing facilities.

Jumping forward to the present, after ten 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 various territories worldwide, plus a number of international retrospective programmes of his films. His most recent short drama Soft has won over thirty awards worldwide.

“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 also, perhaps inevitably, dipped his toe into the music video industry a few times but has remained successfully undistracted by it. Most recently, he has directed episodes of the MTV comedy series Fur TV and is currently in post-production on his debut feature film Dogging: A Love Story, alongside an assortment of other short projects.