Ben McCambridge

Despite a stint spent at film school, it wasn’t until Ben McCambridge upped sticks to the City of Angels and got a job as a runner at edit and post company The Whitehouse that his filmmaking education really began.

“When I was in film school I never thought in a million years I’d ever say this,” says McCambridge, “but I really became enamoured with commercials during my early years in advertising post production.

I remember watching reels from guys like Rick Lawley and being so inspired by the work. It was shocking. A well conceived and executed spot is a beautiful thing.” Raised in York, Pennsylvania right next to Amish country, McCambridge says an active imagination was needed to make anything interesting happen, and he found his outlet making home movies.

“I was always making terribly bad videos with my buds,” he reminisces. “Tons of in-camera edited VHS films, and things became pretty epic when I bought my first MiniDV camera and got the video editing software Pinnacle Systems installed on the Dell. There were many choreographed match action fi ght scenes.”

Since kicking off his career in post production, McCambridge has been learning the ropes behind the scenes as an assistant editor, first at The Whitehouse and now at current company Final Cut LA. But it was while sitting in the edit suite that he decided he wanted to get out there and try creating content himself.

And it’s a gamble that has paid off – McCambridge’s featured spec film PS3 Kids, the first ever commercial spot he directed, is an impressive debut that belies his limited professional directing experience. “I knew I wanted and had to do a spec and PS3 was just the first one that I wrote that I liked,” explains the director. “The writing actually happened really fast. It was a good product for me to start with as well, from a getting noticed standpoint.

The internet response has been bigger than I could have ever imagined it would be and even Sony itself tweeted about how cool they thought it was. Nobody goes online gaga over fan-made stuff more than gamers. It’s actually a really great community.”

Bravely overlooking the old adage of never working with children or animals, McCambridge’s script featured whole crowds of kids in a series of scenes where the protagonists overcome different obstacles, and after casting the whole film along with a fellow assistant editor, the director and crew shot the commercial over one weekend in LA.

“The funniest thing was during the schoolyard fight scene,” remembers McCambridge. “We had two principal actors and around 40 extras, and it seemed like every one of them had brought their entire extended family along with them. There were, like, 150 people there. I would turn around and there would be a shoot that was much bigger than mine going on behind me – 100 parents with cell phone cameras.”

As well as garnering attention from the gaming community, the spot has attracted attention from the advertising world too, with the as yet unrepped McCambridge already preparing to shoot his first proper TV commercial for Charter HD.