Meet Harrogate's Jess Cope, the animator who has worked with Metallica and won a New York Animation Film Festival award

When animator and director Jess Cope was 10 years old, she told her father that one day she would work on a Tim Burton movie.

It was a statement of intent that could easily have been written off as youthful whimsy but true to her word, a couple of decades later she was working on the American director’s 2012 stop-motion animated feature Frankenweenie.

“It is a credit to my dad that he believed me when I said that,” says Cope. “I’m so lucky to have creative parents who have always been very supportive of what I do.”

Not only have they supported her work, in 2014 they all went into business together, forming Owl House Studios in Knaresborough, a production company which specialises in creating animations working mainly with traditional methods.

“It felt like a very natural thing to do,” says Cope, who lives in Harrogate. “Because we all have an artistic background – my mum is a painter and my dad is an interior designer and architect – we are all on the same page creatively. Also we thought it would be good to set up something in Yorkshire – most animation production companies are in London or bigger cities.

And I loved the idea of having a family run company.”

Cope is the director and lead animator for Owl House and she recently won the prestigious Best Music Video award at the New York Animation Film Festival for her short film An Innocent Man made for the music duo Yova who are Macedonian-born vocalist and lyricist Jova Radevska and London-based musician Mark Vernon. The film, like the song, is inspired by Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Set in a small town in the American South in the 1930s, it the tells the story of two young children, brought up by their principled widowed father, a lawyer who defends a local black man falsely accused of rape.

“We often get emails at Owl House from all over the world from up-and-coming artists asking us to listen to their songs,” says Cope, explaining how the project came about. “I was contacted by Yova’s manager and as soon as I heard the song I knew I could make something for it. I loved the fragility of Jova’s voice and I loved the story. And the fact that it was based on a book inspired the hand-made paper-cut animation which gives it that tactile feel and old school look.”

Cope has built up a bit of a reputation as a prog rock music video director and animator. She has worked extensively with musician, songwriter and producer Steven Wilson and through her association with him she was approached to make a film for Metallica. “That was really cool,” she says. “It’s great that now most of my projects are through word of mouth.”

Having graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2008, Cope’s big break came when she was accepted onto C4’s Digital Shorts programme in 2009 which resulted in her 2010 multi-award-winning short The Astronomer’s Sun. She hasn’t looked back since.

As a child in South Africa, where she was born in 1984 and lived until 1998 when her Yorkshire family moved back to the UK, Cope was already honing her filmmaking skills. “When I was about nine years old I made short films with the neighbourhood kids,” she said. “I wrote the scripts and directed them. I guess I always knew what I wanted to do – and I have stuck with that.”

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The film Yova – An Innocent Man can be viewed on YouTube.