The black and white short was made on 16mm film while Scott was a photography student at the Royal College of Art in London in 1962.
Shot entirely in West Hartlepool and Seaton Carew the film features the cooling tower and blast furnaces of the local British Steel North Works foreshadowing images in Alien, Blade Runner and Black Rain.
The central element of the Boy and Bicycle is re-used in Scott's advert for Hovis of the early 1970s.
[1] "We were both experiencing the process that would fundamentally take us through our live together, in terms of making movies", Ridley Scott commented about the film and his brother.
[citation needed] Scott secured finance from the British Film Institute to complete the editing and sound in 1965[2] including a track by John Barry called "Onward Christian Spacemen" (which originally appeared as the B-side of a cover version of the theme to The Human Jungle television series).