John Webster, Executive Creative Director of BMP DDB London, will see his animated creation, Hamilton Mattress, hit the small screen on Christmas Day this year.
Webster is the man behind some of the most famous characters in advertising including the Smash Martians and George the Hofmeister bear and he now hopes that an animated aardvark will bring him as much success away from the advertising arena.
A half-hour film following the adventures of a ragged but rhythmic aardvark, Hamilton Mattress was 20 years in the making. Says Webster, the characters creator and script co-writer; "I'd created a lot of characters in advertising but I wanted to make something that was longer than 30 seconds. The aardvark appealed to me because no one had ever done anything about aardvarks - they're never on Christmas cards, there's never been a Disney film about them. They're quite unattractive creatures, which appealed to me."
After numerous setbacks and polite refusals the project was eventually taken up by Christopher Moll at Bristol based Harvest Films. Moll, formerly of Aardman Animations and one of the men behind the Oscar winning animated short(film) The Wrong Trousers, saw the characters potential and ran with the idea; "Hopefully this film is just the start of Hamilton's on-screen career. We have lots of other scripts and characters in development."
Hamilton Mattress will be screened on BBC1 on Christmas Day.
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