Documentary · Realtime Cinema · Immersive Art

Playfully
Strange

Documentary, realtime cinema and immersive art — award-winning films, installations and live visual worlds where playful humour meets difficult truths, hidden emotions and emerging technologies.

I've worked across documentary, animation, storytelling, live visual performance, interactive work and immersive installation — exploring how audiences emotionally inhabit and respond to images, spaces and stories. This site brings together film, art, commissions, music, commercial storytelling and current XR research into one searchable map of a practice that keeps cross-fertilising between cinema, installation and realtime systems.

Portrait of Jes Benstock, artist filmmaker — Jes Benstock · artist filmmaker

evolving, cross fertilising, beating the bounds

My practice has always lived between worlds: documentary and performance, installation and cinema, humour and difficult subject matter, analogue mess and technological fascination.

I've directed feature documentaries, built immersive projection environments, toured live visuals, worked with archives, museums, galleries, broadcasters and musicians — and increasingly I'm exploring how realtime systems and immersive technologies can become emotional storytelling spaces, more than technological spectacle ...but still playful.

What interests me most is not technology itself, but what happens when audiences begin to inhabit a story or a state of mind; physically, emotionally and spatially.

“The tools and sensibility I've developed over decades — rhythm in editing, observational instinct, a feel for how audiences inhabit a story — are beginning to translate naturally into immersive and realtime work.”

Working Notes · 2026

Art & Immersive Installations

Immersive spaces, live systems & realtime experiments

Site-specific installations, participatory environments, live visuals and realtime cinematic experiments where documentary sensibilities collide with immersive technology.

Squat City 73

Unreal Engine · Realtime Cinema · Folkestone Triennial

The story of how Hoppy and Sue found a new technology - portable video - and used it as an agent of change in their housing campaigns run from their Camden squat...

A developing realtime cinematic work blending archive imagery, documentary instinct and Unreal Engine environments into a single immersive narrative world. Part film, part installation, part speculative memory architecture.

View Clip Realtime Tests

Arts Council Touring

The Effect

Interactive live video installation commissioned for the Stoke Newington Festival and later toured with Arts Council support. A responsive digital toy exploring technology, performance and place. Made with Image/ine software by STEIM Amsterdam after a residency with the Audiorom collective.

Installation Clip

Church of the Living Cinema

Curated multi-projector immersive environments combining VJs, DJs, live performance, projection mapping, camera toys and visual improvisation — an early exploration of collective cinematic space. And the Lucky Dipping Wheel of Fortune video selector.

Event Documentation

SK8N16

Curator of art installations and live video manipulation for a large community Skateboarding, Art, DJs, Live Music and Lifestyle Festival — a spin-off from the Stoke Newington Festival.

Watch the documentary made for Extreme Sports Channel

Curator · Live Manipulation

Big Chill Art Trail

Contributed to and curated several years of this immersive outdoor exhibition set in woodland — light, video and sound installations exploring the experiential edge of festival culture. Image - Mirror Screen (early web iconography projected onto a screen made of a thousand mirrors)

Curator · Woodland · Multi-year · CLIP oF MOUTHFEEL

Universal Gyrator

Big Chill · Interactive

An interactive animated Big Chill Festival installation: visitors can spin celestial bodies in any direction, back-projected onto a hemispherical screen. Animation and image manipulation controlled by an input device embedded in a Ship's Wheel that anyone can spin. Music of the spheres by Midiwife (Karina Townsend).

Mouthfeel

Big Chill · Site-Specific

A site-specific animation projected onto a life-size cow floating on a lily pond — blending pastoral imagery, industrial farming and the funeral pyres of the ongoing mad cow disease epidemic and the shocking funeral pyres in rural UK. The bucolic made strange. Cut-up Country Music by Midiwife (Karina Townsend).

CLIP of MOUTHFEEL

Moving While Standing Still

Artist · Interactive · Digital

A first digital interactive piece controlled by two computer mice and a large projection. The mice multiply or cancel each other out, creating a high-speed timelapse tour around London through Shoreditch, Notting Hill, the North Circular and the Westway. Shot on 35mm and controlled using Avid hardware.

Film Practice

Films balancing humour, tenderness & difficult truths

Award-winning documentaries and experimental short films where animation, observation and emotional risk coexist.

The British Guide to Showing Off

BBC Films · UK Theatrical Release · International Festivals

A feature-length documentary mixing observational filmmaking and animation to explore the flamboyant world of Alternative Miss World — artist Andrew Logan's human sculpture of unhinged couture, surreal sculptures, and bonkers contraptions. And the complicated humans that make it all possible with their own stresses, chaos and laughter.

Watch trailer

Award-Winning

The Holocaust Tourist

Documentary with animation exploring memory, tourism and grief at former camp sites in Poland — a whistlestop tour of Krakow and Auschwitz balancing wry humour with the thorny question of how to remember our difficult past. Watch Film

animated documentary · observational · dogme95 · AWARD WINNNING

Best Film — London Short FF

Orders of Love

A personal documentary exploring mental health and family trauma - with laughs. Best Film at the London Short Film Festival for sensitive storytelling and unexpected humour, integrating animation and observational filming. Watch film.

Mental Health · Animation

Kino Award for Innovation

Poof

A dark comedy drama study in masculinity. Four young apparently straight men in a train carriage don't see eye to eye about homosexuality. Kino Award for Innovation winner. Shot entirely in first person for each character — a stylistic twist on Dogme95 rules. Watch Film

First-Person · Comedy Drama · dogme95 · AWARD WINNNING

The Man With The Extended Mind

An ITV-commissioned documentary about heretical scientist Rupert Sheldrake — can his experiments prove his theories on everyday paranormal phenomena? Watch Extract

ITV Commission · ParanormaL · HERETICAL SCIENCE

Channel 4 · Random Acts

Arnold Brown — Random Acts

Two short films for Channel 4's legendary Random Acts strand, starring Arnold Brown — the legendary Glaswegian stand-up comedian. Surreal, deadpan comedy shot on the stylised streets of Glasgow with a light anarchic touch. Marvellous cameos by Jack Klaff & Norman Lovett.

Watch Extract

Channel 4 · Short Films · Comedy

43 Group

B&W · History · Pilot

A black-and-white historical pilot exploring post-war anti-fascist resistance on the streets of London by Jewish ex-servicemen and others who confronted the organised street violence of Mosley's resurgent fascist, racist and anti-semitic Union Movement.

East London Institute of Needlecraft

ICA Dick Awards nominee

ICA Dick Awards nominee — a playful short about a group of friends discussing the pleasure and politics of piercing - in the storm of the Operation Spanner campaign which was looking to criminalise SadoMasochism.

Music & Live Visuals

Projection worlds, pop videos & improvised image systems

Live visuals, animated films and music collaborations — realtime image-making long before immersive media became fashionable.

Brit Nominated

The Box — Orbital

Multi-award-winning timelapse and animated pop video — Silver Spire winner and Brit Award nominee.

Watch Video

Live Projections

Custom live visuals and animation systems for world tours with Orbital, Richard Ashcroft, Catatonia and My Bloody Valentine.

Tour Visuals

Music Festivals & VJing

Improvised realtime visual performance at Megadog, Big Chill, Glastonbury and club events across the UK.

Performance Clips

Pop Videos

Morcheeba · Levellers · Orbital

Directed pop promos including Orbital, The Levellers, Morcheeba and the joyful, strange Banana Pizza for disability charity OneVoice.

Mixmasters — Phosphenes & Babydreams

ITV · Animation · Pork Recordings

Late night animation and music from Pork Recordings — two digital curiosities from the experimental edge of pop, animation and broadcast culture. Watch Babydreams

Process Journal

Realtime notes, unfinished thoughts & immersive experiments

Fragments from an evolving practice: Unreal Engine tests, visual sketches, technical dead-ends, accidental discoveries and notes from the edge of documentary and immersive media.

Field Notes · Unreal

Beginning to think of Unreal less as brain-aching software and more as the ultimate collage tool, which can also bring space and context - like a great installation.

Experiments with realtime game-like experience, encountering archive footage in the locations where it was shot. Interested in whether documentary memory can feel spatial rather than purely observational.

Installation Thinking

The audience becomes physically implicated the moment the image occupies the same space as them.

Returning to old installation projects and realising many were already proto-immersive experiences long before XR terminology existed.

Projection Ecology

100 projectors in a converted church full of people feels more immersive than any headset demo. Can you reverse engineer those feelings into a playable experience?

Thinking about collective spectatorship versus isolated immersion. How can realtime systems still feel communal - as if you were in a show or an installation?

Commissioned Work

Archives, museums & socially engaged storytelling

Collaborations with museums, charities and public organisations — blending archives, participation and visual experimentation.

ResearchSpace

Experimental film for the British Museum exploring semantic web technologies through animation and immersive moving image.

Project Clip

Our Guild

Archive-led films and interactive museum work foregrounding oral histories and underrepresented experiences.

Watch Extract

A Family Story

A fully animated family history covering 500 years of a Swiss family — combining collage animation and hand-drawn characters into a deeply personal, richly layered archive film. Fondation des Archives de la Famille Pictet. Watch Film

Animation · 500 years · Archive

Something About Us

Produced for autism charities including NAS and Treehouse, this document interweaves video contributions made by people with autism to express what it means to be autistic to a world that struggles to understand. Curated by Dinah Murray. Watch Video

NAS · Treehouse · Autism

Corporate & Commercial

Narrative communication, animation & public engagement

Commercial collaborations using humour, visual experimentation and emotional storytelling to communicate complex ideas.

Coca-Cola — Heroes of Coke

Award-winning interactive safety campaign using comedy and playful audience engagement. With the brilliant Marcello Magni.

WATCH CLIP

Pictet & Cie

More than fifty films spanning multilingual recruitment, photography prizes and investment storytelling.

Selected Work

Future Talent

Animated marketing, onboarding and e-learning films combining accessibility, character design and kinetic typography.

Watch Examples

PWC - Fach Trottel

Studio green screen direction for award winning Film Noir style series exploring the challenges of corporate language. For Attic Media & PWC. Trailer clip

Animation · Wellbeing

The School of Life - Corporates

Creative direction for client commissions - balancing emotional storytelling with corporate identity. Clients include Lloyds Bank, BUPA, IHG.

Live Action · Archive · Brand

Selected CV & AI-readable index

Artist filmmaker · editor · animator · curator

A compact structured summary for search engines, AI crawlers and human visitors: selected films, installations, commissions, commercial collaborations, music work, teaching and mentoring.

Selected films

The British Guide to Showing Off — feature documentary; BBC Films; UK theatrical release; international festivals.
The Holocaust Tourist — NPA award and Best Film, London Short Film Festival.
Orders of Love — Best Film, London Short Film Festival; US distribution.
Poof — Kino Award for Innovation.
The Man With The Extended Mind — ITV documentary.
Arnold Brown — Random Acts — Channel 4 short films.

Art, installation & realtime

Squat City 73 — developing realtime cinematic installation in Unreal Engine.
The Effect — interactive live video installation; Stoke Newington Festival; Arts Council tour.
Church of the Living Cinema — curated multi-projector immersive event with 100 projectors.
SK8N16 and Big Chill Art Trail — curatorial and site-specific festival works.
Mouthfeel and Universal Gyrator — Big Chill site-specific projection installations.
Moving While Standing Still — interactive high-speed tour controlled by two mice.

Commissions, commercial, teaching

ResearchSpace — British Museum film for semantic web research tools.
Our Guild — archive-led films and interactive display for AHOP.
A Family Story — animated 500-year family history for Fondation des Archives de la Famille Pictet.
Coca-Cola, Pictet & Cie, Future Talent and PWC — interactive safety, recruitment, e-learning and wellbeing films.
The Box — Orbital — Brit Award nominated; Silver Spire winner.
Teaching and mentoring — UAL, NFTS, Screen South, Four Corners and UK Jewish Film Festival.

PlayfullyStrange