www.fantasticanimation.co.uk©
About me!
Welcome to the “about me” section of the web site. It's the part where I talk at length about why I got into animation. I'll probably talk about my back ground and experiences working in the industry.
I was born in Stamford, Lincolnshire where I spent an idyllic childhood growing up in the small market town of Bourne. Life was fun and simple. Summer lasted forever and playing out was the norm. Home computers did not exist, fun came in the shape of black and white television set which broadcast staggeringly innocent entertainment by today's standards. With Jerry Anderson shows reigning supreme in the repeats and American shows like Batman, Zorro and The Lone Ranger, it's not hard to see where my earliest preoccupations with fantasy began. I have always been happiest when absorbed into a creative actively such as drawing and my childhood imagination was best expressed when playing out with my friends who shared my passion for adventure. Summers were spent in the local woods building dens and climbing trees just how life should be really - lost in a world you can only imagine now. I drew, I collected comics when the technology we have today was beyond our wildest dreams. We used to laugh at the idea of the computers in Batman and the technology in Star Trek is now common place but thirty years a go it was inconceivable that we would ever have such items at our finger tips.
Eventually I grew up and my tastes and experience of life began to grow with each passing year until I began to take art and creativity much more seriously in school and decided this would be the focus of my life for better or for worse. Some more years pass, and I graduate with a degree in Graphic Design from Leeds Polytechnic and embark on the business of finding employment as an animator. This is pre computer graphics, so I was aiming for stop frame work - usually unsuccessfully in the early nineties things were tough. Nick Park and Aardman are kings of the world at this point and I revere them just like every other animator of my generation. I drift through a series of unsatisfactory jobs until one day I quit and embarked on a Computer Animation course. This was not an entirely satisfactory and drift again until I hear about the London Animation Studio then only in its first session, I apply and am accepted to be a proud part of LAS 2. So begins a gruelling six month course in professional animation training the real deal this time, a course run by true professionals. Here I meet some pretty cool people who go onto do great things. I graduate and resume the long hard task of seeking employment as a computer animator still not an easy option for anyone starting out. I continue my struggle until I eventually break into some small time TV work, this does not last long and soon I'm back on the road looking for work. I work my way through a succession of small studios and learn much about the business in this time.
At the moment I am fully occupied maintaining this web site and developing new work for my demo reel.
If you require a full PDF copy of my CV - then please contact me via email and I'll send you a copy.
Some of my heroes are as follows...
Rene Laloux
George Herriman
Morris & Goscinny
Jan Svankmajer
(to name but a few...)