Reflections is the first feature length film by me, available to watch online (YouTube;https://www.youtube.com/@sambackhouse ) from August 8th 2026 at 4.44pm GMT. The film is an 80 minute documentary compiled of a lot of footage taken over the years, ranging from photos taken of myself from childhood, archive footage taken from my travels in countries such as Senegal, snippets of short films and stop motion animations, extracts of pages from some of my self published comic books, photographs I’ve taken over the years and much more..
For several years I had been feeling a deep inspiration to create a documentary film with a poetic voice over narrative similarly to Chris Marker’s film Sans Soleil. It was back in December 2009 at the age of eighteen when I made a short personal family film shot on location on holiday in Scotland with my father, stepmother, half brother and step siblings. After I returned back home to England I put together the footage I’d shot on my digital camera at the time onto a laptop at my art college in Barnstaple here in England, and created the film which I then burnt onto several discs. I used to work on films and animations at college whenever I found some spare time, making full use of the film software programs, and this actually didn’t have anything to do with my course work at all and I recall one of the teachers who kept on telling me off when I was noticed working on something which wasn’t a part of the project I was meant to be focusing on instead. “You’re not supposed to be doing that-!”
The Scotland film I made, simply entitled Scotland Holiday was received very well by my family when I showed it to them and my father told me it was his favourite film. This encouraged me to create more films, and so I did.
I had been making a few short films and animations prior to 2009 already and remember frequently borrowing my father’s camcorder during my teenage years and playing around with film and sometimes trying to create stop motion animations which were made poorly by recording something for a second before stopping the recording, and during playback the result would end up looking like a slow animation with a lot of clicking sounds going on. I don’t know where these early creations of mine have ended up.
I was fascinated by animation as well as literature, comics, cinema and other art works. In the 2000’s I remember being very inspired by the Animated Exeter festival which used to go on in the city of Exeter; during the festival I had the privilege of going to talks by Aardman co-founder Peter Lord and another from the legendary stop motion genius Ray Harryhausen; I absolutely adore Jason and the Argonauts and it is without a doubt one of my all time favourite films, within my top 100 favourite films.
When I left art college and begun studying illustration for a degree, I decided to finally bring in my animation skills into some projects, most notably during my final third year where I created a short 3 minute animation collage entitled History of America which was my angry reaction to my enormous dislike of the corporation known as the United States of America.
During the project I also created several short paper cut out animations and I am still very proud of some of these animations today, particularly Car, Coconut, Food, Game Over, LSD & TV. It is only recently that I have discovered the genius work of Phil Mulloy and his style reminds me of these animations I’ve made.
Andrei Tarkovsky blew my mind with the film Stalker when I first saw it at about the age of eighteen; it left a very deep and powerful impact on my soul.
Then when I discovered Twin Peaks and the work of David Lynch I was again absolutely blown away in a similar way to how I felt when I first experienced Tarkovsky. I created the short film Door in 2015 drawing on inspiration from these artists, and also Kubrick.
One day in the early days of 2024 I think it was, actually it was one evening, I was in the caravan I was living in at the time and I discovered that a china doll I’d had since at least the age of three had a head which could move, and suddenly a great idea formed in my mind of seeing if she would animate well.
She did indeed. I animated her upon a shelf in my caravan at night with an overhead torch and moved around various objects including shells, a wooden elephant, a toothbrush and a fire extinguisher which could also teleport and it kept spooking the doll out; the animation was completely improvised.
She became a star of mine and after projecting visuals at my friend’s party I was then invited to project at other parties, events and small festivals.
I gave the doll the name Heidi and she is a recurring character who appears throughout my Party Reel series, ten of which I have now put together. Some of my favourite Heidi animations are Heidi in the Woods, Heidi and the Books, Heidi and the Ping Pong Party, Heidi in October and Heidi in Black and White.
Reflections is comprised of four segments which have been called chapters and the first 3 chapters were created in May 2025 and released individually online, the first chapter so far being the most popular, and it can also be viewed like a stand-alone film if you want, similarly to Star Wars before it became known as Episode IV: A New Hope.
I felt very inspired to keep on creating more parts for Reflections. I don’t intend to reveal any spoilers here. After three Reflections chapters in the can before the end of May 2025 I sat back and focused on creating more footage to project at events as well as putting together the third annually released issue of my 123 page Blot Comic which I released on the site Lulu, dedicated to David Lynch.
I became drawn to the idea of creating a final chapter for Reflections, a Chapter 4, and I wanted to take things to a different level and stitch together all the chapters of Reflections into a feature length work of art. I sat on the idea for over a year and finally put ideas that’d been building up in my mind together in June 2026, completing the film. This film is now yours to enjoy for free from August 8th 2026.
The film speaks for itself and this post here wasn’t intended as being a deeply detailed explanation of what the film is about; that’s really for you the viewer to work out for yourself. I have viewed the film several times now and it becomes a different film each time.
My on line stream is on a different line to the inter net of webs and nets; what are webs and nets but traps..
Trailer for Reflections-:
(Note-: Aug 8th 2026 has arrived and here is the film itself-:)
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