Boy and Bicycle

Boy and Bicycle is a 1965 black and white short film directed and written by Ridley Scott and starring his brother Tony Scott. It was Scott's first film, shot on 16mm film while he was a photography student at the Royal College of Art in London. Although a very early work – Scott would not direct his first feature for another 14 years – the film is significant in that it features a number of visual elements that would become motifs of Scott's work. Shot in 1960/1961 entirely in West Hartlepool and Seaton Carew the film features the cooling tower and blast furnaces of the British Steel North Works foreshadowing images in Alien, Blade Runner and Black Rain. The central element of a boy on a bicycle is re-used in Scott's 1973 TV advert The Bike Ride for Hovis.