Emma Lee Benson is a Los Angeles-based artist. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film & Video from California Institute of the Arts. She has worked extensively with mixed media, film and animation. Emma has written, produced and filmed a number of short films. One of her collaborative projects, “Moe and Mel,” a paper cut stop-motion animated film, was featured in an international film festival.
She has experience developing screenplays from scratch, shooting with industry-grade RED cameras, and doing post-production in Premiere Pro. She has a love for the analog mediums of film photography and stop-motion animation, and she puts as much care and dedication into the projects of others as she does her own. She has collaborated with a variety of artists to bring their ideas to life, as well as working on live shows and theatrical productions that have sold out their venues in Los Angeles.
Emma’s motivation lies in working in the film industry and creating experimental narratives. Her work has recurring themes of divinity, gluttony, dream logic, ephemerality and unrequited love devolving into obsession.
Her goal is to make art that doesn’t encourage our culture’s fixation on youth, and the resulting “ageism” in todays society. She believes in portraying aging with the full spectrum of beauty it can offer, and capturing the perspectives of those that refuse to hide it.
A story from reddit, immortalized.
Bedside drawings of dreams.
Best friends Sara and Roxanne set out for a long and treacherous walk deep in the mean streets of Santa Clarita. The journey seems aimless until they come to their final destination, a past event full of regret and trauma.
A compilation of scenes from live action films from 2019 to 2023, featuring music from their respective projects.
A paper cut out animation showing the sad and menial lives of our two main characters Moe, Mel and Seymour the cat. We see the two roommates as they struggle through the early days of the AIDS epidemic.
A 1990s children’s show starring our two main characters Scamp the dalmatian and Annabelle the cow. In this episode, Annabelle and Scamp make an apple pie for their picnic until the illusion starts to break and we can see the marriage between the two shatter.
A music video for Tev Nicolas’s song ‘Nosemilk.’ The music video’s narrative tells a loose adaptation of ‘Dante’s Inferno,’ starring Jim the puppet as he makes his way from purgatory, heaven and hell.
A series of hand drawn and paper cut out animations from 2020 to 2021, featuring the Tom Waits song ‘Top Of The Hill.’
A music video for Tev Nicolas’s song ‘Worthwhile’ from the band ‘The Plastic Otters.’ The music video depicts a singing sun and our main character Jim the puppet. The story entails Jim making his accidental departure into heaven and meeting ‘the oracle.’
A vegan propaganda piece that shows the dark underbelly of the egg industry. The film is a collage, montaging real footage of violent factory farming and performative dancing with egg-like slime and menstrual blood.
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© 2023 Emma Lee Benson
