Lecturer in Film Production
Simon joined the Film Production team at UCA in 2009, having previously worked as a freelance filmmaker and educator. He taught for a number of years with the Documentary Filmmakers Group on their documentary immersion courses in Poland, Morocco and London.
Bio
Simon has been a visiting lecturer at London College of Communication, Oxford Brookes University, Bernie Grants Arts Centre and University of Wales Institute.
Simon studied film at Newport Film School, Wales followed by BA (Hons) Fine Art at the University of Wales Institute in Cardiff. He has a postgraduate certificate in Learning and Teaching in the Creative Arts.
Simon has created work that has been screened at festivals, galleries and artist events in Britain and abroad.
He currently teaches documentary and short form filmmaking across the BA Film Production and MA Documentary Practices.
Further information:
Research statement
Simon makes personal and subjective forms of documentary.
His research interests focus on place and memory and use various landscapes as sites of investigation and discovery. In particular, the landscape of his hometown of Eden, Northern Ireland.
His short documentaries have been broadcast on Channel 4, FIVE and ITV London. Film London, Arts Council, England and Wellcome Trust have also commissioned his films.
Professional Membership, Affiliation and Consultancy
- Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (2011).
Since his 2004 short film EDEN, which was commissioned by Film London's Artists' Film and Video Awards he has made a series of films over 12 years, about this strange and half forgotten place. His 2009 notebook film 'In Case I Disappear' was broadcast on Channel 4's Three-minute Wonders and distributed by Soda Pictures on Guy Maddin's 'My Winnipeg'.
In 2013 he gave a paper at an Encounters conference, University of Manchester, which developed into his essay ‘There’s no place like home’ being published in the 2014 British Sociological Association Auto/Biography Yearbook.
Recently his research explores how 360-degree video and 3D capture of the real world creates new opportunities for documentary storytelling.
Simon has been developing a digital story project called ‘The Last Landscape’, which has been mentored by the Sheffield International Documentary Film Festival and selected for development at the Screen4all Transmedia Campus 2014 in Paris.
As part of this research Simon has collaborated with creative studio Unfold, on a photogrammetry 3D scanning and 3D printing residency, which invited UCA students from different disciplines to take part. The project had unique access to a collection of curated objects from the Army Medical Services Museum at Ash Vale. The outcome was a prototype for a ‘Datacase’, an interactive case of curiosities with digitally printed objects ranging from Crimean, Boer, and First World War.