Education
He studied Film & Television in the animation department at the Royal College of Artist
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Simon Pummell
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Early in his career Pummell made animated films for United Kingdom television produced by Keith Griffiths, producer of the animators the Brothers Quay. In this period Pummell also made two films for the rock band Queen - a special video album for the release of Made In Heaven. The clip Heaven Foreign Everyone was an early documentary portrait of the cyborg body-artist Stelarc.
The Queen video album Made In Heaven was produced by Janine Marmot for the British Film Institute.
Pummell and Marmot subsequently formed a company together Hot Property Films. Bodysong (2003) is a transmedia project that included a research project to trace as much individual information and as many narratives as possible about every individual event and person portrayed in the many hundreds of archival footage clips used.
The Ivor Novello Award nominated soundtrack is notable as being the first film soundtrack written by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead. Paul Thomas Anderson championed the film, and went on to work with Greenwood on the Oscar-winning feature There Will Be Blood.
William Gibson has written an essay on the film for the British Film Institute 2010 Digital Video Disc re-issue of the film.
Having taught for several years at Harvard University VES as a Visiting Professor, Pummell was a Harvard Film Study Center Fellow in 2008-2009. His second feature film Shock Head Soul (2011) was a feature-length documentary biopic depicting the insanity and Outsider Art autobiography of Daniel Paul Schreber. lieutenant premiered in Venice International Film Festival 2011.
An associated gallery exhibition has been shown with the film in Rotterdam International Film Festival and Melbourne International Film Festival, as well as M HKA museum of Modern Art Belgium.
He is listed as a Research Professor in Media Design at the Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam.
