Director Biography – Ben Hansford (UPRISING!)

Ben is an award-winning director born in New Orleans, Louisiana and raised on a steady diet of film, fine arts, music, and Dungeons & Dragons. Given his not-so-hidden passions of robots, film-making, and more robots — Ben taught himself 3D software, and started filming everything he could. He now lives in Los Angeles, but don’t hold that against him.

Director Statement

As a chubby, introverted, Cajun kid, I used to love science fiction as a means of escape. I was always running off into the strange dystonia of BladeRunner, the haunting foliage of Tepper’s Grass, the emotional coldness of 2001: A Space Odyssee… But as I grew older, I realized sci-fi wasn’t just an escape pod — it was a tool to talk about what was happening in our present lives. By extending out into the worlds of the future, I found the creative liberty to talk about the problems of today and where they were heading.

Enter Uprising! A post-apocalyptic robot comedy abouta chubby introvert who’s lonely in a sea of humanity. His only super-powers: a commitment to his friends and countless hours playing video games. (Ha! Part autobiography, part wish fulfillment!)

The making of this film was a true labor of love. (And a little madness.) I learned 9 new pieces of software, spent years animating, rendering, and rotoscoping. And made incredible friends along the way.

UPRISING! really could not have existed without the extended-family I have around me now. Some donated Kickstarter funds, others animated for hours “on the box”, others re-textured robots, actors came on board just because they loved the idea of supporting ‘the little guy’, and our friend Alex even spent months in his garage building a real-life robot puppet named Terry the Trashbot.

I had the greatest, most talented, supportive team to lean on. When things went wrong on the shoot (getting kicked out of a major locations, art dept truck got impounded, lost 50% of crew the first day) Everyone stepped up and fought like hell to get us back up and rolling. It was both awe-inspiring and humbling.

In short, I’d be nowhere without my friends and family.

So I hope you love Uprising as much as I do. There are so many awesome moments in this film, and so many awesome memories behind it.

Thanks you.