Stroud Film Festival — Rabbitman presents Underbytes
by Alyssa Pearce | Amplify Stroud
March 2026
Nothing encapsulates Stroud’s vibrant and talented art scene more than a community event set in the heart of the town, run by two of its residents. I sat down with Willow Coxon and Corin Dunsdon, founders of Rabbitman Events after their celebration of Young short-film makers at last year's Stroud Film Festival.
Who are Rabbitman?
Corin: The logo was inspired by the film DonnieDarko, but the name came from all the rabbits that have appeared in my life in a lot of haunting capacities. I went on a shamanic journey which you do when you become a teenager in Buddhism, and I met a rabbit, I suppose it’s kind of the spirit animal equivalent.
The actual events started when we did work experience at Stroud Valley Artspace (SVA) and organised an event which included music, some films, and poems. Which is when we started making a lot of films ourselves.
What’s On
Willow: Rabbitman is a type of event which allows creativity to come together and we’re hoping to inspire young people in Stroud.
Corin: We’ve been inspired by a lot of people who have done similar things, we’re not trailblazers.
In the films that you yourselves make, are there any particular topics or themes that you like to explore?
Willow: Surrealism and symbolism.
Corin: I really like drawing upon different aspects of early 2000s comedies and I’m also really inspired by people like Yorgos Lanthimos and directors who are a bit crazy. I try to not take anything too seriously when making films.
IMDb
Are there many other opportunities for Young People to showcase their work?
Willow: I think there are but it wouldn’t be screaming in your face, you have to be searching for it.
Corin: And that’s why SVA is perfect. It's so relaxed, if you want to do something you just have to be willing to try it.
Have you found the lack of opportunities difficult to overcome?
Willow: I think what inspired me to actually start this was organising the events and having a goal rather than having to find something to join, this was the starting point for me.
Do you think that Stroud has a stronger base of creativity than other places in Gloucestershire and the rest of the UK?
Corin: I definitely do, Stroud is such a unique place, Cerys Matthews from Radio 6 is always talking about Stroud music and I think that's a testament to our scene, it’s very experimental which is what makes it so interesting.
How would you like to see Stroud evolve to give young people more opportunities to showcase their work?
Willow: Having more events and more free opportunities, because it's really hard to have the motivation to spend money on things that you feel that you should be having fun doing when you’ve only just started earning your own money, especially at the moment with the cost of living crisis.
“if you are under 18, it would be great to go to events that are inclusive of all ages to show them that this is an option for young people to maybe do in the future as a career.”
— Corin Dansdon
Willow: It can be really hard to find events and things to do if you’re under 18 but, I think that’s what SVA does well, it fills in that gap. If you’re part of the SVA community you feel connected with people with the same mind as you, and you can get more opportunities that way.
Have you found any challenges when making films or organising the events?
Willow: The technological side, this was the first time we’d used an Apple Mac, it’s a whole skill in itself and really stressful!
But our biggest struggle was getting people to follow through with sending their films, if you don’t already know us it must be quite intimidating but I feel like with any event like this you should just go for it because the people who are organising it are going to be really happy to get all of the submissions and even if your film doesn’t get shown you still have that experience of reaching out to these organisation, it’s all a process.
Corin: Yeah, we had a lot of films submitted but the thing with Stroud is that we’re all very last minute so up to the day before the event we were really worried that we wouldn’t have enough to show, so we were messaging people in desperation to send in their films, but suddenly it all started coming through and we realised that we actually had loads.
Tell me a bit about the Mould Collective?
Corin: It has been around for ages, young people come to SVA to make art and films and then it stopped a few years ago but we were asked to start it up again, it’s about 10 people and we will sit and drink pepsi, we just had an art session making pinhole cameras.
Willow: It’s free and anyone can come along, on a Thursday 4pm - 6pm at SVA, just email [email protected] or message us on our instagram @mould_collective.
How did you find running an event for the Stroud Film Festival?
Willow: We took it very seriously, but we were very much supported the whole way through.
Corin: I think we got a lot of our audience through the brochures, for other events we mainly use social media campaigns through Instagram which is where we connect with the younger audience, we can’t really tell what works best, but we really enjoy making the content so even if it’s not very helpful we’re going to carry on doing it.
Youth Film-making
Underbytes is a collection of short films made by young film directors under the age of 25 that covers a very diverse array of themes and topics. Here is a taster of what you can expect.
I talked to Meg Dryer who is part of the Woebegones who made the film PINNED for last year's celebration of young film-making.
What was PINNED about?
“We had less than a week to make this film so we had to choose a theme very quickly. We decided -after a lot of debate- to explore the treatment and views of women by the media and society.
“There were two parallel stories that we used as metaphors for this: a flower growing and being cut for someone to press; and a butterfly coming out of its chrysalis and then being caught and pinned, hence the title.
“Both the butterfly and the flower had their lives cut short for the purpose of capturing their beauty, the beauty of youth, for the sake of pleasing someone else, just so they could look at them.
“At the end, there is a display of all the pinned butterflies, we were going to have flowers too but ran out of time. The camera then pans to a girl pinned up next to the flowers.”
The making of PINNED
“There were five of us that contributed to the film, all friends from school. We made a social media account and named it The Woebegones, to echo the sadness of the film. The first person painted the flowers. I cut out the butterflies and animated them by blue tacking them onto paper and scanning them in.
“We wanted to show that lots of girls go through this experience of being objectified and judged only on their appearance by having the girl's face morph into lots of different colours and facial features (drawn by someone in our group).
“We emphasised this as the flower morphed into different types of flowers, and the butterfly changed colours and wing sizes. The editing took a lot longer than expected but the fifth person in our group edited it all, animating the flower section, putting together my butterfly section, collating the images of the girl and the drawings and adding music and sound.”
What challenges did you face while making PINNED?
“We made PINNED for work experience at SVA and we struggled with how time consuming animating was. We ran out of time so there weren't as many colours and faces on the girl as we had hoped.
We also had a showing after the summer holiday in 2024. Sadly, the social media account we had made didn't gain the publicity we had hoped for.”
What did you enjoy most about making PINNED?
“I have never animated that type of stop motion before and I really enjoyed the hands-on feel of it. I have also never had to make a social media account for publicity so that was certainly an unexpected learning curve.
Our editor also made posters to hang up around Stroud and seeing them all printed off professionally was a great feeling.”
Is there a future for The Woebegones?
“I would definitely like to animate again in the future, but The Woebegones won't be making any films together again. PINNED may be submitted to more short film showings though!”
Watch PINNED here
Alyssa Pearce is the Deputy Editor for Amplify Stroud.
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