Ben Cole

Ben Cole is the best web designer I know. He’s also a fantastic sound designer, resident advisor, and the president and creator of the Underground Showdown Film Festival at Chapman University. (http://www.undergroundshowdown.com/). Ben has been designing websites since he was in middle school. He created the Underground Showdown website, his own personal website (http://www.bencole.net/), and this site. He is a great guy to go to with technical questions about web design and computers in general. Just sitting in his room and watching him write code and manipulate objects for this website was impressive. You don’t really know how complex web design and code is until you watch Ben work with it in ways you don’t understand.

I was fortunate enough to work with Ben on an Advanced Production in fall 2010. We were the sound designers on the project and I don’t know how I would’ve gotten through it without Ben. He had all the steps planned out from doing ADR (automated dialogue replacement), Foley, CEDER (Computer Enhanced Digital Audio Restoration), room-tone, effects, and mixing. Ben is the kind of person who doesn’t get flustered by a problem. If he doesn’t know how to do something he is still confident that he can figure it out. Technical problems don’t phase him.

I actually knew a lot about Ben before I met him in person. The summer before coming to Chapman I was introduced to the Underground Showdown website by a friend of my cousin’s. I thought the idea of having a club where students make movies every two weeks just for fun sounded awesome. I watched every single movie on the site at the time (which was about 36 movies) and knew everyone in the club before even showing up on campus. The first week at Chapman I recognized Ben like a normal person recognizes a movie star. Now I help Ben Cole run the Showdown at Chapman.

Ben is somewhat of a social media expert. He carries around an Android smart phone with which he responds to all of my emails within five minutes. It’s kind of amazing.