Lee Hardcastle

Lee Hardcastle attended the Northern Film School in Leeds, and turned to animated film making when he struggled to get his ideas made into films as he had trouble socialising with the other people on his course. He started playing around with stop motion animation because it allowed him to create his short film ideas by himself on a low budget. 
After he finished studying, he was on the dole for a year while trying to find a job in the industry and eventually managed to get a job as a runner at Scramble studios in Soho, London. Here he was able to experiment and learn how to use the VFX software, and made professional relationships including one with Tim Atkins, who still does a lot of audio on his short films. While he was working there, Lee still worked hard on his own work, writing comic books and scripts when he was unable to physically create films.

Entering competitions is one the most important and best things you can do as a freelance animator. They allow you to work on set briefs, get your work seen by more people who might then contact you for a piece of work they would like you to do, and they also present the opportunity to get paid for your work by winning the competition. It can be disheartening when you don't win or get any feedback on your submission, but when you get recognition for your work it is an amazing feeling.

Lee entered the Done in 60 seconds competition with his remake of Evil Dead. The 'Done in 60 Seconds' competition asks for people to remake classic films within the time limit of one minute. This short film was the first film made by Lee that got a lot of recognition, and went viral. He even got requests for interviews and people asking for him to create videos for them, so he started thinking about what made this so successful and decided to continue creating claymation videos. He the quit his job at Scramble and moved to the south of France to work at a cafe and write screenplays and enter competitions when the tourist season was over. This was when google got in contact with him and asked to put adverts on his youtube channel because of the success of his Evil Dead video, and that video earned him £50 in a short amount of time.

He started looking at other animation that were of a similar style to his, and came across 'Chainsaw Maid', which had a lot of views, so Lee made a sequel. 

He quickly learnt that the more videos he put on youtube, the more money he could make from them. He started making more videos that would get a lot of views on his youtube channel, and giving them names that would catch peoples attention and get more clicks. 

This lead him to create 'Pingu's The Thing', which was massively successful until he got sued by the creators of Pingu and told to take it down. Then he created Claycat, a pingu-esque cat, and recreated his video of the Pingu/ The Thing mash-up with claycat. He then turned this into a series of claycat animations.

The ABCs of Death came around, with 26 directors creating a short film for each of the letters of the alphabet. There was a competition for the 26th director, who had to make a short film for a way to die with the letter T, and Lee Hardcastle won with T is for Toilet. Being included in a feature length film was his dream. T is for Toilet was so successful because Lee knew his limitations that came with his claymation style and he put a lot of effort into the set design and the story. 

Lee doesn't consider himself an animator, despite the majority of his work in the last 10 years being done in a claymation style. He refers to himself as a film maker instead.

Being a successful freelancer is all about branding yourself. You need to brand yourself to get commissions and jobs in the creative industry.

This talk has taught me that being a freelance animator, especially if you are work in claymation in the UK where Aardman get most of the claymation commissions, is a challenge. It can be disheartening and a struggle to earn enough money to keep yourself a float and pay rent, but when you win competitions, and get approached to do work for big brands, it can be very rewarding and getting paid for doing something you enjoy is really exciting and makes it all worth it.