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BEN WATSON—

Hello, I’m Ben. An award-winning post production art director, video editor, motion designer & visual effects generalist based in London.

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DOCUMENTARY SERIES
POST PRODUCTION ART DIRECTION, VISUAL EFFECTS, MOTION GRAPHICS
2024

Description

I worked as the post production art director on this two parter documentary for the production company Mindhouse.
The docuseries is about three women's lives and how they are changed forever when a prolific cyber stalker infiltrates their social media accounts.
The project involved around 300 shots of motion graphics and visual effects. As the series takes place on social media platforms over the period of 10 years, we had the challenge of recreating multiple social media UI designs such as Facebook, Instagram & Snapchat for whatever year the documentary’s story took place.

Trailer

The Messages

My personal ideology when working on any type of motion graphics work is to treat the shots as if a physical camera crew would film them, and with that idea in mind I designed all the social media graphics to have an accurate physical texture and feel to them. Creating and running everything through a custom Phosphor Dots texture - accurate to how a physical LED screen works - created various artifacts and chromatic distortion you only see when a camera is pointed at a screen, combined with textures of fingerprints, dust and scratches displacing the image as well, all of this ultimately added to the stylistic look and aesthetic I wanted to create.
The idea of basing the digital graphics in the physical world was the priority when designing the scenes as it was all to help tell the story in the end. The women's stories featured in the series had their physical worlds completely changed by the digital one and so using this idea threaded through all the work we did for the show certainly helped contribute to the story of the series.

Episode One Stills
The “Beams”The telephone lights or 'beams' as we called them, helped convey the tone throughout the series — a visual representation of the cyber stalker himself.
I wanted the look to be less of an electrical lightning bolt, but more towards a stylistic digital entity, something wholly unique to the series. The design in the end is a combination of a few different elements, there is the main shape, quite a simple dotted line locked and travelling along the telephone wires, on top of that I added various glows and directional lighting effects to create the main stylistic volumetric look.
Just to add another touch of detail on top of all of this, I wanted the light to reveal digital looking particles floating around it, a motif we used throughout the show in various ways. Every now and then you'll see these particles - almost like digital spores hidden from the eye, but always there. To those particles I added a pixel looking texture and ended up playing them at a different frame rate to the rest of the shot, giving them a very glitchy and digital look to them.

Episode Two Stills