{"id":9759,"date":"2018-08-29T14:37:33","date_gmt":"2018-08-29T14:37:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/filmcitybrighton.org\/?p=9759"},"modified":"2018-08-29T14:38:30","modified_gmt":"2018-08-29T14:38:30","slug":"interview-with-ben-matt-at-the-progress-film-company","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/filmcitybrighton.org\/interview-with-ben-matt-at-the-progress-film-company\/","title":{"rendered":"Ben & Matt at The Progress Film Company"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Introduce yourselves…<\/p>\n

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We are Ben Lankester and Matt Hopkins, directors and founders at The Progress Film Company in Brighton.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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What brought you into the film industry?<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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We first met at the University of Bournemouth in 2003. Both Bournemouth Media School and Bournemouth Arts Institute are\u00a0renowned places for practical film studies in the UK and many of our current and former staff members have graduated from courses there.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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How did you decide to create The Progress Film Company?<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Upon\u00a0graduating from Bournemouth, we both took jobs as freelance shooters and editors and\u00a0decided to come together to form Progress, pooling our\u00a0various clients under one roof.\u00a0We took the name Progress from\u00a0the original Progress Film Company, which formed in Shoreham-by-Sea a hundred years ago. We\u00a0continued to service our respective clients, essentially as freelancers, slowly working on bigger jobs where we employed\u00a0both full time and freelance crew members, and the Progress name gradually begun to spread beyond just\u00a0\u2018Matt and Ben’. The Progress team grew quite organically from there into the 18-strong company we are today.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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What does Progress do?<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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We call ourselves a contemporary film studio\u00a0because we are exactly that. We make everything from commercials, digital content, branded entertainment, animation and\u00a0feature-length cinema under one roof, with a two-tiered management structure\u00a0servicing both agency and direct-to-client needs worldwide. What makes us different is that we are a company created by filmmakers for filmmakers, and we are proud to build the nurturing and development of directors, producers and animators into our company DNA. Our team comprises everyone from recent film school graduates to experienced heads of department, but what brings us all together is the desire to tell stories. Independent filmmaking is at the heart of everything we do, with our films, shorts and series the work we remain most proud of.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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Why did you choose Brighton?<\/div>\n
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We are both from the seaside – Ben from Bognor Regis and Matt from Worthing – so Brighton felt like the natural place to build our home. Over eight and a half years we\u2019ve moved between\u00a0several offices across town, and a few years ago set up shop at New England House where we are proud to inhabit the largest film and photography studio in Brighton\u00a0alongside our partners The Brighton Studio. We\u2019ve always been proud to call ourselves a Brighton company, especially when pitching ourselves against the various London film companies of which there are so many.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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How do you see the film industry in Brighton and surrounding areas?<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Since we started, we\u2019ve always tried to tie the Brighton creative and filmmaking community into our identity as a company, and\u00a0nothing makes us more happy than building new relationships with Brighton-based clients and agencies. Five years ago we set up The David Thomas Awards, a\u00a0collection of prizes, events and\u00a0workshops supporting young filmmakers in\u00a0Brighton,\u00a0and we are currently exploring new event ideas to be held at our\u00a0studio, where Brighton-based filmmakers come in to discuss their process. Our studio has edit and colour suites, meeting rooms and\u00a0photography spaces, which we hire out to Brighton filmmakers and creatives, and this has been a great way to connect with the wider Brighton community.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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What would you like to see more of in the Greater Brighton Film scene?<\/div>\n
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We\u2019d like to see more communication and a stronger sense of\u00a0community within the\u00a0Brighton film scene, which is why we\u2019re looking at creating new events to\u00a0bring like-minded people together. The creative scene in Brighton is so strong and so identifiable to people\u00a0outside of Brighton, but we feel that as a city we\u2019re\u00a0still not tapping into the true potential of collaboration that\u2019s\u00a0available to us, and this is something we\u2019re looking to address with these new events.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
http:\/\/progressfilm.co.uk\/<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We call ourselves a contemporary film studio because we are exactly that. We make everything from commercials, digital content, branded entertainment, animation and feature-length cinema under one roof, with a two-tiered management structure servicing both agency and direct-to-client needs worldwide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":9766,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[24],"tags":[28,36,58,60,61,56,62,59,57],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/filmcitybrighton.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9759"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/filmcitybrighton.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/filmcitybrighton.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/filmcitybrighton.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/filmcitybrighton.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9759"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/filmcitybrighton.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9759\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9770,"href":"http:\/\/filmcitybrighton.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9759\/revisions\/9770"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/filmcitybrighton.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/filmcitybrighton.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/filmcitybrighton.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/filmcitybrighton.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}