StopMotion Men - Music with Film In The Summer of 2004 Geraint replied to an advert Ben had placed in a local music shop, this was to be the beginning of The StopMotion Men. Geraint had previously been in a band, touring around the UK and parts of Europe before moving to Cardiff to do an art degree and look for new people to play music with, Ben had been running a studio for 4 years and playing drums and piano for various bands, including a tour of Northern India, before coming to Cardiff. After their initial meeting, followed hours of conversation, sat on bedroom floors strewn with CD’s and Dvd’s. 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 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. Focusing 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 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 having to compromise the integrity and longevity 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 intention being to work with many different film makers all over the country so as to have various 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, practising 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.SMMSo here we are now, in the last 3 months our online fan base has rapidly grown, we are playing every show we can, sometimes this means playing without films but this is a challenge we enjoy. Watch us play and you will see in our eyes and on the screen, that this sense of urgency and aggression is not teenage angst, it is a reflex response from having to swallow these years in retail, debt, credit cards, loan adverts, processed meals anti ageing cream commercials and celebrity obsession, making us all buy things we don't need, fear people we don’t know and play in the dark corners of the internet.