TIME100 AI 2025

Here's a great commission for Time Magazine and their annual TIME 100 AI 2025 list of the most influential people working in Artificial Intelligence. The loose brief was to create an image that was interesting and abstract and conveyed the concept of AI without being too obvious. The design director Chelsea Kardokus had referred to some of my 3d work in the past, such as the Secret 7" chrome swan and the BBC Science Focus Dark Universe cover, so it was a no-brainer to turn to Cinema 4d to begin creating this piece.

My first ideas revolved around the notion of a cybernetic flower of some sort with metal thorns to convey the notion of a flourishing technology with potentially very prickly elements to it. I really enjoyed modelling the flower and experimenting with textures and lighting but soon decided to move on to another train of thought. The image of a spherical egg-like object came to mind with an all-seeing eye, suggestive of the birth of a powerful new technology possibly, so I modelled and rendered that to present with my other concepts, some of which are shown here. The cyber-egg won the day so I developed that further in Cinema 4d with a ripple effect beneath, catching some interesting reflections, and took the renders into Photoshop to refine the eye with its luminous data-strewn field of view.

I've included here a Cinema 4d render of the basic model and an alternative version with subtly different lighting and textures. A really satisfying and enjoyable job and it's a real pleasure to see it across the Time website and print edition so many thanks to Chelsea for taking a chance on me. You can see this on the website here also.

Galaxy Glitch

Here's a new, and always very welcome, commission from BBC Science Focus and art director Joe Eden. This one was a cover and spread on the theme of The Galaxies That Shouldn't Exist and strange signals from deep space that reveal flaws in our understanding. The brief was to depict a galaxy with some sort of distortion so I had fun going to town on glitch-in-the-matrix visuals. Joe asked me to try out some type treatments to accompany the illustrations and I worked up some pixel-warped ghosted headers. You can also see these on the site here and other Focus work here.

Oasis Live '25 Tour Visuals

After enjoying working on Oasis' Stop Crying Your Heart Out visualiser earlier in the year I was super excited to be asked by Chris Curtis at I'm Your Boss Films to work on the animated visuals for the gargantuan Oasis Live '25 Tour with a crack team of talented illustrators and animators. Featured here are live videos I took at Wembley on August 2nd and a series of stills from the two song visuals I animated.

First up was the animation for Stand By Me working with Director Chris Curtis and ace collage artist Mia Angioy on Art Direction duties. The overall theme was that of an emotive scrapbook-esque journey through old family photos and Mia supplied some beautifully collaged style frames for me to begin structuring the animation around. The format was super-wide with space on the outer edges for live band video feeds so I designed moving textured backgrounds based on blocks of flats and unfolding paper effects to suit the collage style and content. The hefty After Effects project evolved as Mia supplied further collaged material, photos and some lovely stop motion unfolding imagery to work with. The majority of photos featured came from the family albums of the production team, including some of mine, and it was a joy to animate and design the camera movement through them all. Really happy with the final animation and it was unbelievable to watch (and video) it live at Wembley with the huge crowd singing along. 

 

The second animation for Champagne Supernova had originally taken shape as a visualiser to appear on Youtube along with Stop Crying Your Heart Out and other recently remastered releases. I'd created the original animation with Director Chris Curtis and super talented Art Director Mario Wagner and was really proud of it so when I heard it would be graduating to the big concert screen I was elated. The concept for this was a continual upward looping journey through epic vistas that would gradually become stranger and increasingly psychedelic as the song progressed. Taking Mario's really strong style frames as a starting point I developed the After Effects journey through volcanic lakes, cloud cities, underwater kingdoms and space canyons and loved making every frame of it. For the tour visuals I needed to expand the original 4k 16:9 frame to fill the super wide tour format and make a few tweaks and changes to improve it's impact at that scale. I don't mind saying that it's probably my favourite Oasis song so it was overwhelming to watch it at the end of an amazing show at Wembley followed by a huge fireworks display. A proper career highlight and very grateful to have had the opportunity to work on it.