Ontario father makes action film starring his kids

Dad makes film starring his kids as action heroes The 10-minute movie took the Ajax dad four years to make.

An Ontario man who had always wanted to make his own action movie didn’t have access to Hollywood stars or professional equipment, so he enlisted his kids and used his iPhone.

Brian Vowles, an animator in Ajax, Ont., says he planned to spend three months on the passion product. Four years later, he’s released “Robot Attack” on YouTube.

The 10-minute movie features his two boys taking on terrifying robots in an post-apocalyptic world.

“I knew I wanted to do something,” Vowles told CTV Toronto. “I've had a million ideas for years.”

His sons were easy to convince, but his son Dylan admits that the project dragged on a little longer than expected.

“At the beginning it was fun because we got to go to a bunch of abandoned places, but at the end I started to be done with it,” he said.

Still, the boys were proud of their father when they saw it screen in a local movie theatre last week.

“Both kids cried. My dad cried. I think just because they know how long I've been in here,” Vowles said, referring to his basement animation studio.

Vowles says there were days when he also wanted to give up but then someone would ask how the project was going. “And you're just like ‘fine,’ and you just go back to the basement and just keep trudging,” he says.

The movie has racked up thousands of views but Vowles isn’t planning a sequel anytime soon.

“There’s more story you could tell there,” he says, “but not with one guy in a basement.”

With a report from CTV Toronto’s Scott Lightfoot