Sam Baron

Infobox actor


birthdate = birth date and age|1988|06|08
birthplace = London, England
occupation = comedian, writer, director
website = http://www.sambaron.com

Sam Baron (born 8 June 1988) is a comedian and writer from Cambridge, England. His father is Simon Baron-Cohen, and he is a cousin once removed of Sacha and Erran Baron Cohen.

His first feature film, "Can You Survive a Week in Paradise?", was screened at the Cambridge Arts Picture House in 2004. In December of that year, his documentary "Family Rights Group" was screened at the Barbican Cinema in London, presented by Ken Loach. He was also featured very briefly in the documentary "They Made Me Do It Too: The Cult of Donnie Darko" on the Director's Cut DVD of the film "Donnie Darko" (2001).

Throughout his teenage years, he directed over 200 short films, often with collaborator Raphael von Blumenthal. With the advent of YouTube came some recognition from a larger audience, and he moved into developing webisodes for several shows which eventually evolved into television pilots.

Internet Videos

In March 2006 he co-wrote and starred in a UK response to the "Saturday Night Live" rap video "Lazy Sunday" which became successful on the internet. [ [http://www.illimms.com/narnia.html "Lazy Sunday UK", (a.k.a. "We Drink Tea")] ] . It received praise from "SNL" writer Jorma Taccone and "Lazy Monday" creators Mark Feuerstein and Sam Friedlander, and a clip from the video was featured on CNN. Later that year, the duo performed the song live on the BBC show "Let Me Entertain You".

In 2007 they were commissioned by MTV to create an awareness video aboutglobal warming for the MTV Switch campaign. The video, produced by MarkWhelan and Cake Group Ltd., was shown around the world Al Gore’s Live Earth events in 2007, and screened on MTV worldwide. The video, a rap about climate change [ [http://www.illimms.com/global.html "The Global Warming Rap"] ] , alsobecame a popular viral video on the internet.

Television Shows

Since then he has created and produced three pilots for television series' with von Blumenthal. The first show, entitled "Tom's Life" [ [http://www.illimms.com/tom.html "Tom's Life"] ] , was a sitcom about high-schoolstudents who get themselves into wacky adventures to distract themselves from their depressingly comfortable middle-class suburban lives. It was popular on the internet video website YouTube but was never developed into a full series.

The second show, entitled "Lemon Party" [ [http://www.illimms.com/episodes.html "Lemon Party"] ] , was a surreal comedy sketch show starring the two creators in every single role. The show also gained a large following on the internet and was picked up by the UKtelevision network Trouble, where the individual sketches were screened as part of another show, "MyTV: Homegrown" [ [http://www.somethinelse.com/project/homegrown/17458.html "MyTV: Homegrown"] ] . The pair were also invited to host two episodes of that show, performingoriginal material written for the occasions. The first version of the hour-long Christmas Special they presented was decided to be too controversial and was subsequently banned. Their entire work had to be entirely re-written and re-shot at last minute, to comply with the channel's broadcast standards.

The third television pilot is 2008's "House of the Rising Egos" [ [http://www.illimms.com/tvpilot.html "House of the Rising Egos"] ] , co-created by the pair with comedian Jack Miller. They describe the show as an "anti-sitcom", a faux-documentary about four university students who move into their first house together. In the show, the characters find that the dream of living with your best friends soon gets overshadowed by the minutiae of chores left undone, and in the vein of "Seinfeld" and "Peep Show" before it, it’s life's little foibles which test the strength of life-long friendships. [ [http://www.illimms.com/variety "College Students Create TV Show"] ] The sitcom pilot, in which Baron plays ‘Sam’, von Blumenthal plays ‘Raph’ and Miller plays ‘Jack’, started off as a web-series, with short webisodes on YouTube. But when these also became popular, the decision was made to create a TV pilot for the show.

Baron is now pre-production for a number of different projects. He runs a website where all his short films are available to download. [ [http://illimms.com/index.html Illimms Official] ]

References

External links

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