What We Do

Here at Slinky we aim to find the most creative and effective treatment for everything we do.

Often that’s for commercial projects with worldwide advertising agencies like Arnold, Saatchi NY and Publicis, with clients ranging from KRAFT & Starbucks, to Google and Lever Brothers. We also like making ideas from scratch, designing characters and creating concepts for our own series, shorts and feature projects.

We love working with creative clients who care as much as we do. Our archive is overflowing with award-winning animation and live action, short films, series content, titles, branding, idents, music promos, and tour content.

Who We Are

Maria Manton

Co-Founder, Creative Director & Producer

Maria Manton has over twenty two years experience working in animation, live action and special effects. Her love for filmmaking has led her to working with nearly every type of animation style and filmmaking technique. In that time she has produced hundreds of commercials and 13 short films to date.

Since Slinky’s beginnings in 2000, she has produced most of the company’s incredible output of award winning short films, broadcast, commercial and branding projects. In addition to developing feature length projects at Slinky, Maria has also found the time to direct a number of stop frame animation projects.

Maria has also produced many music videos and tour content, producing the entire video and projected content for the U2 Elevation World Tour.

Maria also consults on and sets briefs for The National Film & Television School, the RCA, and is regularly asked to sit on juries for BAFTA and panels for onedotzero in Tokyo. Maria also speaks at a number of film festivals throughout the world.

Chris Shepherd

Co-Founder & Director

Chris Shepherd was born in Liverpool. His work has been nominated twice for the film BAFTA. His credits include commercials, title sequences and the award winning Stareout sketches on BBC/Talkback’s Big Train.

He is co-founder of Slinky Pictures with producer Maria Manton. Their acclaimed short, Dad's Dead, was a winner of over 24 international awards including Best Short at the British Independent Film Awards. In 2006 their follow up short, the hit live action & animation ‘Silence is Golden’, won the TCM Best Film Award at the London Film Festival and picking up a number of other awards worldwide. More recently, his cult short ‘Who I Am and What I Want’ co directed with the artist David Shrigley, was commissioned by Channel 4 and sold out quickly it's Limited Edition DVD release.

Chris is currently in development on numerous feature length projects, but still finds the time to direct commercials, judge at festivals and always has a new short film he wants to bring to life.

Ryan Smith

Producer

Ryan Smith joined Slinky in 2004 all the way from Texas. Since then has taken on a number of roles within the company, these have included managing internships, production assistance and Festival Co-ordination. The latter has him juggling Slinky’s extensive short film archive through worldwide distribution.

Most recently he has produced a number of commercial projects, including titles for the 2009 East End Film Festival, and Slinky’s collaboration with Polydor and iPhone, with the animation for Snow Patrol’s album ‘One Hundred Million Suns’.

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