Studio Underdog documents the anatomy of a watchmaker’s rebellion
A film series captures the craft, the humour and the meticulous human effort behind Studio Underdog's hand built chronographs. One man with a loupe, one well thumbed reference book, and two who knew exactly how to frame the perfect shot.
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A craftsman leans into his loupe, the light warm and concentrated on his work table. Around him, scattered in studied disorder, the apparatus of the horologist’s trade: tools worn by hands that have learned them, reference volumes dog eared from years of turning pages, the small precise instruments that ask for nothing but attention and a steady hand. This is the opening image of Studio Underdog’s new film series, the brand’s documentary account of how a single man came to build watches that irritate no one and upset the industry’s stale conventions in equal measure.
Founded in Maidenhead, England by Richard Benc, Studio Underdog arrived in 2020 as an act of deliberate irreverence. Where the watchmaking world concerned itself with millimetre increments and heritage terminology, Benc saw an industry taking itself too seriously and decided to build a studio that would make serious watches without the ceremonial solemnity. The film captures the intellectual architecture of that choice: walls painted by hand, mountains built from nothing, a workspace where big ideas and too much coffee collide into something genuine.
The documentary moves through chapters that read almost like a watchmaker’s notebook. The quartz crisis appears not as catastrophe but as a curious party. Machines arrive and are treated with appropriate suspicion. A robot plays puppet to two humans with a stick and purpose. The camera finds Tim Green at the workbench, that particular figure painted as a character in a story about men who make things the old way, framed by the yellow brightness of the studio’s walls and the perpetual glow of technical ambition.
What emerges is not a polished brand film but an intimate record of craft in its element: the concentration, the small failures that lead to clarity, the knowledge that builds only through doing. The series documents a moment when a British microbrand chose to let its audience see the thinking hand, the reference book, the loupe, the light.
Imagery courtesy of Studio Underdog (@studio.underd0g).
