I have been involved with film projects as far back as 1998, when I worked with Dave Mckean on his film 'Neon'. I made CG sets and environments, animated and worked the cameras for many of the scenes. Following this, I also worked on 'Asylum' with him and was post production supervisor and editor for the pilot of 'Signal2Noise'. As a result of this, when Dave began pre produciton on his first feature, 'Mirrormask', I was asked to develop a team and production facility to make the graphical content. As I was a director of Shroom at the time, we worked together with executives at Henson and Sony as well as Dave and his producer,, establishing the software and hardware to be used as well as recruiting a team of 20 or so animators and artists We designed the process for each shot within the film, working directly with Dave and his storyboards and the script. This allowed us to budget precisely the staff and machine time for the whole 73 minutes..
Left and above left are clips from 'Neon', a short film by Dave Mckean.
After we finished our work on Mirrormask, we immediately took up the task of preparing our first film as Shroom (not strictly true as we had produced a few low to no budget pieces such as entries to '2359', a 24 hour film production festival. Having worked extensively with Channel 4 on Emily Jame's project, 'The Luckiest Nut in the World', we were in a good position to gain a commission, most likely through 'Alt TV', but the idea we went with was 'TERRA 2050' which was much more suited to 'The Slot' or as it is now know 'Three Minute Wonders'. We produced a series of 4x3 minute minidocs with an overall narrative arc, click here to read and see more about this project.
The clip to the left shows an excerpt from the pilot of 'Signal2Noise'. We filmed with an array of fifteen PD150's and then recombined the different shots using a camera flash as the sync frame.
I am currently working on adapting a short story by author Jeff Noon called 'Stigmatica' as a short film to direct with screensouth as part of their digital shorts programme.