A woman who grew up in Silsden has had her work nominated for a prestigious BAFTA award.

Emma Lazenby has won recognition for directing an animation production based on the Airedale Hospital midwifery career of her mother, Pam.

Pam Lazenby, 59, who still lives in Silsden, was a midwife for 27 years and said she was very proud of her daughter’s achievement.

Emma, a former South Craven School pupil, said the six-minute-long animation, called “Mother of Many”, was inspired by and dedicated to her mother.

She said she began work on it in January last year, alongside her producer, Sally Arthur.

She said: “My mum had just retired and at the time I was thinking about what an amazing job she had done and about how hard and stressful it was, but beautiful as well. She’d delivered a large number of babies in the Keighley area and I wanted to celebrate that.”

She secured funding for the project from Channel Four, the South West Screen agency and the UK Film Council.

She said she had got to know many working midwives while researching the animation.

The film’s traditional two-dimensional technique incorporates sounds from recordings of real-life pregnancies.

Emma, 33, added that the film had strangely been something of a “fertility charm”, as a number of her work colleagues were pregnant by the end of the production process.

Although the animation was formally launched at a festival in Bristol, in November last year, she said she only found out she had been nominated for a BAFTA last Thursday. “It was a lovely surprise but I was a bit disbelieving at first,” she said. “I thought it was a joke.”

She and her mother will attend the lavish BAFTA awards ceremony, at Covent Garden, London, on February 21.

There they will discover whether “Mother of Many” has been selected to win the short animation category.

Emma said it would be shown again at different festivals around the country but would not be broadcast on terrestrial television until much later this year.

Her mother said she had seen the film and was impressed. “It’s a very calm, sensitive portrayal of what midwifery is all about,” she said.

“It was extremely well received at the launch.”

Emma currently works as a freelance animator at the Arthur Cox studio, in Bristol.

She was born in Bradford but lived in Silsden from a young age until leaving to attend university.

She took a BTEC in graphics and art at Bradford College then studied graphics and animation at Hull University.

Before moving to Bristol she was the lead designer on the highly successful children’s television series “Charlie and Lola”.