Lives in London. Studied English MA at Kings College London and Art BA at Chelsea College of Art and Design, London. Studied MA in animation at the Royal College of Art, London. Selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2007. Finalist in Jerwood Moving Image Awards 2008. Winner of Short & Sweet / Getty Images Short Film Challenge. Winner of Best Animated Short Film at Seattle International Film Festival and Tampere Film Festival in 2009. Winner of McLaren Award for Best New British Animation at Edinburgh International Film Festival 2009. ---> Email: lauriehi_AT_hotmail_DOT_com ---> Laurie is represented in the UK by Annex Films for commercials, music videos and digital. www.annexfilms.co.uk ---> You can check out heart-warming older news items by clicking on the monthly links over on the right. Look out for a new website coming soooon!

Director:
Laurie Hill

I’ve pretty much decided to move over to Instagram (and Facebook) for continuing activity updates!

Check out ongoing news @laurie__hill
https://www.instagram.com/laurie__hill/

This blog still serves as an archive of older entries however!

I may still decide to add a few updates on occasion – let’s see!

Director:
Laurie Hill

A bit of news! I’ve just co-directed a new micro-short called Sir John Lubbock’s Pet Wasp.

It’s a collaboration with the excellent Osbert Parker.

We were very fortunate in finding a team of wonderful and talented people to help us bring it about.

The 2 minute version is here:

https://https://vimeo.com/297121305//

There’s also a 1 minute cutdown version on Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BqH4Ne-lkOw/

Details below:

Sir John has a problem with his pet wasp stinging him. Can he overcome its base urges through a tailored education programme and application of sweet treats? This documentary-fantasy chews over the thorny question with a delightful blend of cut out and stop frame animation styles.

Inspired by the life and writings of Sir John Lubbock (1834-1913) and the unnamed wasp.

An Anim18 and Animate Projects commission, supported by Lottery funds from Arts Council England, British Film Institute and British Council.

Directors: Laurie Hill and Osbert Parker
Producer: Abigail Addison at Animate Projects
Co-Producer: Osbert Parker
Animators: Laurie Hill, Osbert Parker and Ollie Griffiths
Animation Assistant: Thrishali Sumanasekera
Compositors: Laurie Hill and Michael Zauner
Editor: Julian Tranquille
Composer: Terence Dunn
Sound Designer: Rob Szeliga

I have a few film stills too!

Director:
Laurie Hill

And how about this for quality content? An exciting production still from my recent Vigorsol Air Action Xtreme Mission film!

Director:
Laurie Hill

Here’s some news!

I’ve directed a tasty animated project with Annex Films. It’s an online film for Vigorsol Air Action Xtreme gum, BBH the agency behind it.

This was a little while gestating but it finally got the go ahead and we dived in, plunged into a world of lemmings and snow.

It’s a collage-style project using manipulated photographic and footage source material from a variety of places. As such it required some heavy-duty picture research from the outset and there were some interesting challenges along the way!

I gotta say, I was working with a very very wonderful, creative and crazily talented animation team for this. Thank you Bill Porter and thank you Michael Zauner. You’re both amazing! Animation was by the three of us.

Here’s a link to my Director’s cut.
http://www.annexfilms.co.uk/portfolio/vigorsol

Here’s a link to the Italian language version.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIbwNvYq98M

Blurb on the Annex website about the project.
http://www.annexfilms.co.uk/news/laurie-hills-vigorsol-air-action-xtreme-mission/

I’ll pop a few stills in too. Here we go:

Director:
Laurie Hill

Hey – more content to offer – a new interview! This one’s with BeyondChron ‘San Francisco’s Alternative Online Daily’.

http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=8519#more

This ties in with Photograph Of Jesus showing at NY-SF International Children’s Film Festival.

Ok ok – so here’s a little interview that was taped by apengine –
I’m blethering away merrily there – apologies!

https://vimeo.com/6665165

Director:
Laurie Hill

There’s a fun little Q&A I was asked to complete up on the British Council website.

Here’s the link:
http://film.britishcouncil.org/comment/spotlight/2009/laurie-hill

Director:
Laurie Hill

images courtesy of Getty Images

Film title:
Photograph Of Jesus

Running time:
6 mins 40 secs

Description:
Looking for photographs of Jesus, yetis and Hitler in 1948?
Help is at hand with this documentary-fantasy based on true stories of requests for impossible images. Real-life archives become the stage where fact and fiction collide, belief runs amok and unruly images have a life of their own.

Aspect ratio:
16:9

Language of dialogue:
English

Director:
Laurie Hill

Film title:
La La Song

Band:
The Kissaway Trail

Track title:
La La Song

Record Label:
Bella Union

Running time:
3 mins 5 secs

Description:
Beneath an innocent exterior, this promo for The Kissaway Trail reveals a darker, maggot-ridden heart. Made on a tiny budget, Laurie Hill directs, animates and stars as the cutout runaway in a tale of near-misses, frustration, escape and its repercussions. A stray rocket out of the blue brings disaster, the heavens offer encouragement from afar and a deluge of cockroaches, maggots, dinosaurs and butterflies makes satisfaction an elusive goal. A digital/stop frame collision with plenty of blu-tack.

Extra info:
The idea was to create a surface-level innocent story of escape but then reveal a darker flip side and its repercussions.

Pure cgi can get a bit sterile – and I was really trying to avoid that. I wanted to try a hybrid approach combining computer animation with traditional stop-motion techniques.

I created my main puppet using cutout photographs and wire – I’m sure you can still see some of the blue tack and glue if you look closely enough! But it’s those hand-made touches and glitches that give it vitality and character. I stop-frame animated this and the other found objects against a bluescreen, shooting with a digital stills camera. These were then placed within computer-generated 3d environments made with elements by illustrator Tekura Maeva.

Aspect ratio:
16:9

Director:
Laurie Hill

Film title:
My First Taste of Death

Running time:
9 mins 30 secs

Description:
Another special collaboration crossing the barriers of time.

A kind of angsty and tormented take on Hollywood actioner full of surreal detail and humour. Me and the boss discover Dodo island, I face a deadly struggle with my nemesis the demented sea scorpion and the whole adventure can only end in tears.

Miniaturised King Kong but without the ape?

Extra information:
As with My Life At 40, the script is a genuine document written when I was 12 and left unedited.

BAFTA award-winner Ian W. Gouldstone provides the voiceover.

About the music: ‘I wanted a powerful original score to be a key feature of my film and was keen to have a close collaboration with the composer, Andrew Lomatschinsky, from a very early stage in the development of the film. Visual and musical ideas were to develop together and proceed through close dialogue right through to the final dubbing session. Jacquelyn McKay provided the soprano vocal performance.’

Andrew Lomatschinsky comments on the score: ‘All the music is original and written for this film. As a point of interest, the text used for the soprano is formed from extracts of writings from Hildegard von Bingen (c.1175 AD).’

Aspect ratio:
16:9

Language of dialogue:
English

Director:
Laurie Hill

Film title:
My Life At 40

Running time:
7 mins 40 secs

Description:
I’m not 40 yet but I’m forward-thinking. A special collaboration between the director, aged 12 years, and his 34 year old self, both looking forward to a glorious future as a 40 year old conservation hero and Lamborghini owner. Made with six years to go!

Note on technique:
This film uses a variety of techniques: real and computer animated cutouts, drawing, photography and time lapse. No moving image cameras were used – just digital stills cameras.

Extra info:
My Life At 40 is billed as a collaboration between versions of myself at different ages struggling to articulate and realise their dreams. In doing so, a negotiation between idealism and pragmatism occurs. The script is a genuine document written when I was 12, rediscovered many years later.

Directly after completing My Life At 40, I worked on a project for BAFTA-nominated director Osbert Parker – a promo film for the World Wildlife Fund, ‘WWF Living Planet’, featuring lots of great cutout animation.
‘My Life At 40′ describes my desire to become a conservation hero by the age of 40 and so this felt like it was a step in the right direction!

Generally speaking, the drama of Control Vs. Unruly Forces is usually bubbling away at the heart of my work and this can fly off in any number of directions. There is also a tension between the desire to create narrative and another to dissolve it. A healthy dose of (dark) humour and a sense of absurdity are also crucial ingredients in the mix. If I can make myself laugh I know I’m on the right track!

Aspect ratio:
16:9

Language of dialogue:
English

Weather Report is a collage of footage home recorded over an entire year on one UK channel – weather reports. The supposedly banal is transformed into cultural gold!

Director:
Laurie Hill

Project title:
Weather Report

Individual work titles:
1. Weather Report
2. Chrissie, Sian, Martyn, Robin, and Becky
3. Chrissie
4. Sian
5. Martyn
6. Robin
7. Becky

Running time:
approx. 45 secs each
all together 6 mins

Description:
Composites formed from instances of appropriated TV footage: national and London weather reports recorded over an entire year 2004-2005 on one UK channel.
These home-recorded reports have been cropped to a single video ‘line’ each and spliced together to form new hybrids.
Together the hundreds of linear fragments play back simultaneously, as do the vocal commentaries.

Chrissie, Sian, Martyn, Robin, and Becky is an amalgam of multiple presenters, charting the frequency of their appearances.

Aspect ratio:
4:3

Language of dialogue:
English

Director:
Laurie Hill

Another nice piece of Jerwood news here:

My Life At 40 is one of the eight finalist works up for the Jerwood Moving Image Awards 2008.

There’s a complete streaming version now available online at
www.jerwoodmovingimage.com

There’s also an exhibition of the eight finalist works on at the Jerwood Space in London at the moment, details below

Jerwood Space: 20 February – 20 March 2008

Jerwood Space
171 Union Street
London
SE1 0LN

Jerwood Space opening times:
Monday – Friday : 10.00 – 17.00
Saturday – Sunday : 10.00 ? 15.00
Entry: Free

For some reason items of news keep on dropping off the bottom of these pages so I’m going to try to bring them back somehow!

April / May 2006

East End Film Festival, London, UK

13th Stuttgart International Festival of Animated Film, Germany

February 2006

Finalist & awarded Runner Up in Experimental Animation – Animex Student Animation Awards, Middlesbrough, UK

January 2006

Eat Our Shorts, National Film Theatre, London, UK

Halloween Short Film Festival, Institute of Contemporary Arts / Curzon Soho, London, UK