Ben Sanders from Grantham, has his film 'After The Journey' in the show - Martin Barber caught up with Ben and asked him about his film.

What was the inspiration for the film?

The inspiration for this film was originally to do with my childhood fascination with the nostalgia of the Old West, and how I always thought it would be a great period to visit.

This of course can't help but be coloured by the romantic picture of the West that is built by films like Once Upon a Time in the West, and their dramatic scores.

I then decided that this notion of memory and looking back on things, be they real memories or ones you wished to have lived, would be an interesting area to explore.

Scene from After The Journey by Ben Sanders

This train of thinking is influenced by many individual things, for example the simple narrative is partially influenced by the third Back to the Future film, and Doc's desire to live out the rest of his life in the past.

Also, stylistically, I took inspiration from cartoonist's such as Herge, E.H. Shepard and Seth (a Canadian New Yorker cartoonist and comic book creator).

Seth's work in particular explores theme's of nostalgia and the alienation of the present, in his case his interest lies in the early to mid 20th century. My cinema is a homage to Seth.

What are you hoping people will take away from it?

That there's a beauty in sadness, loneliness, the loss of love and the memories of it (whether they are real or idealised), and that there is something uplifting about it.

Much as in the way the paintings of Edward Hopper make us identify with these lonely characters in motel rooms, or cafes at night, and by that very nature of identifying with them breaking down some of our own barriers of loneliness.

What were the challenges of the production?

Managing every little element, because there are so many different jobs to do when your doing it all by yourself, especially hand drawn animation.

I think the hardest thing was the balance between learning how to do things you've never done before, and having the actual time to do them.

A lot of the time you have to let go of certain things, whether that's in terms of complexity or quality, just so that you can get them done on time. That letting go, making the decision that you'll have to sacrifice something, so that the whole thing will work in the end is quite a hard thing to stomach.

Finding an efficient and effective method of inking and colouring the drawings on computer, so that they produced the effect you were looking for was the other big challenge. The solution I found for this wasn't ideal but again it was one of those decisions that had to be made, and in the end it does the job.