Stopmotion Men

Biography

The Stopmotion Men are a three piece band from Cardiff who play film inspired Alternative Rock. Their aim is to combine film with live music, by working with film makers who create their own interpretation of their songs and then project them live on stage.

The band begun in 2004 when Geraint replied to an advert posted by Ben in a local music shop. Geraint had previously been in a band, touring around the UK and parts of Europe. He moved to Cardiff to complete an art degree and to look for a new people to play music with. Ben had been running a studio for 4 years as well as playing drums and piano for various bands including a tour of Northern India, before coming to Cardiff.

After their initial meeting, hours of conversation followed with the two sat on bedroom floors strewn with CD's and DVDs. They forged a friendship built on point blank worship of the Seattle years, Danny Elfman scores, Manga and Tartan Extreme, the films of Tim Burton, Chris Cunningham, Jonathan Glazer, Warp and many more, the life-altering live shows of the the great rock bands they'd seen and the ones they'd have died to have seen, and those moments of musical perfection that accompany the images in the dark of the cinema.

The first year of the band was a fiercely creative and difficult time. By focussing on the music and film they had a shared love of, a sound was forged combining Ben's heavily rhythmic and drum influenced piano parts with G's angular guitar work and soaring vocal melodies.

As the lyrics developed it was clear they had a strong visual narrative that accompanied the filmic nature of the music. The band also realised that in the modern day climate of everyone battling for a few seconds of attention, how vital it was to immediately convey these stories and entertain an audience without compromising the integrity of the music. This led to a decision being made to capture these ideas on film and project them live at the shows.

A local student filmmaker Alun D Pughe already had an impressive portfolio and was the ideal choice of director to start working with. The band intended to work with many different film makers all over the country, so as to have different interpretations of the songs while promoting individual film makers and their respective styles.

Over the next year the music and the films evolved and the band played a handful of small gigs with various drummers (or Ben's recorded drum parts) around Cardiff.

By now Geraint and Ben had been looking for the right drummer for over 2 years, they wanted to build a band that worked as people as well as players, friends that could manage to spend every night after work together and still be touring together in 10 years time.

They found all this in Elias Cole, a Music tech student from North Devon. Elias threw himself into the music, practicing to the tracks in the day and then with the band every night. He learned how to integrate into the music and play in time with the films in an incredibly short space of time. The lineup of The StopMotion Men was now complete.

The band are constantly looking for new film makers to work with, so if you are interested in what they do get in touch with them on their myspace page. read less

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