Touché: The year Lancing animator was shortlisted for the British Animation Awards

Trevor Hardy’s short film, Touché, was then screened across the country in February 2010 as part of the Public Choice Awards.

Trevor said at the time: “I am very excited to be shortlisted but there are so many good films in there, so I do not really hold out much hope for myself. It is lovely to be put in, though.”

Touché, a stop-frame production, is the tale of a cheeky cat which gets more than it bargains for when it upsets a dog.

Trevor won best animation for another of his films, Pushkin, the previous year, at MOFILM – the global mobile short-film festival.

And his success has continued. In September 2019, his first feature-length stop-motion film, Strike, was released in cinemas.

It took Trevor and his team three years to make the family hit, which tells the underdog story of a mole with an impossible dream.

Trevor was part of a team of around 200 people working on the project at Gigglefish studio in Lancing. He said putting the film together had been an exhausting task – but that seeing it on the big screen at the end of it all was ‘amazing’.

In the early 1990s Trevor, who grew up in Shoreham, was made redundant from his job at a tyre fitting company in Worthing.

He found himself watching Wallace and Gromit on TV and said he thought: “That’s brilliant, that’s what I want to do.”