Acid 2 Time

Here's a fun experimental animation project created with Cinema 4D/Redshit and After Effects. It's a music video for the track Acid 2 Time taken from the album Drift by friend and collaborator Graeme Swinton's latest Acid House incarnation Mobile Mother.

Crafted with high-end 3d graphics, gritty moving textures and vfx, the video is a series of animated loops of swirling 3d sculptures that progressively deteriorate and overlap as the soundscape intensifies. It's also a cracking excuse to indulge in a fetish for late 90s techno aesthetics, see Autechre's Incunabula cover. You can watch the video on the main site here also and get Mobile Mother's Drift from Bandcamp here.

Champagne Supernova Turns 30

I was really pleased to see the Oasis Champagne Supernova visualiser I worked on a year ago get an official unveiling on Youtube for the 30th anniversary of the classic song. Created for Director I'm Your Boss Films, with art direction by Mario Wagner, it was upgraded to play with the song during the finale of the awesome Oasis Live '25 concerts, detailed in this post from last August, so didn't think it would see the light of day as a visualiser. I had a great time animating it so it's wonderful that the original cut is now out there for all to see.

Dance Cop

Here's the lastest animated poster design for the upcoming Dance Dance Dance night at Margate Arts Club. Furthering the visual adventures into a psyche-punk universe with illustrated type and a sun-bleached palette. Digitally collaged with 3d modelled elements, 2d textures and photography in Photoshop with the short social media animation put together in After Effects. See the full series of posters on the main website here.

AI-wakening

I've been having a bit of 3d experimentation fun this week with Cinema 4d/Redshift, After Effects and a dusted-off 3d android bust I modelled for an AI themed BBC Science Focus cover concept in 2023. That job eventually went in a different direction but I always fancied revisiting this idea to get it out of my system. Initially, I created the third blue-tinged visual as a Redshift render test that I took into Photoshop for further treatment to get the kind of look I was after. I then developed the lighting, textures and illuminated tech interior to bring a little life to the humanoid and finalised the orange and yellow iterations. When I was happy with the visuals I decided to render out an animated version featuring the AI emerging from a primordial tech-soup and giving us a little spin - then presumably overwhelming us all. Hey ho. You can see the work on the main site also here.

Merry Xmas 2025

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.

Dance Valkyrie

 

Here's the latest Dance Dance Dance poster design for their upcoming evening at Margate Arts Club. Another animated offering, this time designed around a sky chariot-riding DJ valkyrie of some sort.  Always fun to indulge my psy-fi predilictions on these! See the full poster series on the site here. 

Stop Crying Your Heart Out Visualiser

Back in May Chris Curtis at I'm Your Boss Films got in touch about working on a 'visualiser' for Oasis to celebrate the launch of the remastered Time Flies singles collection and generally get Youtube audiences pumped for the Live Tour this year. I was happy to jump onboard this exciting opportunity and join an amazing team of creators already busy at work mass-producing incredible Oasis visualisers, which I soon discovered were essentially animated music videos sans the fiddly lyric bits.

I was tasked with creating the Stop Crying Your Heart Out visualiser with a quick turnaround time and got straight to work. Chris and art director Mario Wagner had established a lovely retro look and feel with a library of assets to play with so I pillaged the image and video banks and added a few of my own elements to the mix. The process was an adhoc and intuitive construction of the animation in After Effects around a loose narrative as it formed in my mind to the looping music based on memory, dreams, and capturing nostalgia. It was a tad stressful turning it around in a few days but creatively energising and rewarding and I'm pleased with how it came out. There's a wonderful collection of visualisers on the Oasis Youtube channel to check out and more being produced. Excitingly, this process has lead on to greater things and has been something of a warm-up for getting to work on the Live Tour concert visuals, more on which to come. 

Dance Dance Dance For The Win

Here's the latest Dance Dance Dance poster design for the regular Margate Arts Club event hosted by Katie & Joe. This one continues the atmospheric style refresh from the previous poster with illustrated type framing an amphibious character having a golden hour dip. I also tried out a short and simple animated version for social media posted here. 

Speaking of the previous poster I was very happy to hear it had picked up an Applied Arts award for Advertising Illustration and will appear in the Annual Awards issue and online here.

Lidoverse Merit

Chuffed to pick up a Merit Award in the Uncommissioned category at the Hiii Illustration 23 competition for my ongoing personal project Lidoverse. Always nice to get recognition, especially for creative work close to your heart, so thank you to the jury. Here's my bit of bumph about the project.

Lidoverse - A series of personal illustrations and animations that are based on a local landmark called the Cliftonville Lido in coastal Margate, UK. The work re-imagines the modestly proportioned Lido in epic and miniature scale in an alternative seaside universe. One populated by abstracted takes on Margate’s architecture, signage, concrete promenades, coastal hazard markers and sea wall escape ladders.

Hiii Illustration 23 Finalists

Happy to report that two of my projects have been chosen as Finalists at the Hiii Illustration Awards 2023. First up is The Dark Universe illustrated and animated cover for BBC Science Focus in the Publishing category. You can vote on that by clicking 'Like' on its page on the Hiiibrand site here if you're inclined. Secondly, my personal project Lidoverse is selected in the Uncommissioned category and can be 'Liked' here. 

The Future Of Everything

Here's a commission I greatly enjoyed for the Wall Street Journal and their The Future Of Everything supplement on the theme of AI weather prediction. The brief was to create an illustration and animation representing data in the form of a weather front of some sort so I went to work on a few initial visuals. With the animation requirement in mind I experimented with some MoGraph techniques in Cinema 4d to simulate cyclones and rainfall then took some frames to help create the works-in-progress seen above. A direction was chosen for the cover illustration with notes to push back the cyclone in favour of a digital rain effect and give the clouds more depth. For the final I had fun adding intricate digital detail and designing the image for an unusual vertical cover format. The animation was needed for the online edition so I created a short loop from a 3d camera move into the clouds and digital rainfall. You can see that on the WSJ site here. I was also asked to provide a further editorial illustration with a similar theme and developed an AI weather vane rooster concept. Thanks to Caitlin Choi for a really satisfying commission overall. See more work for the Wall Street Journal on the blog here.

Anti-Ageing Diet

I've been neglecting the blog a little due to a freakishly busy few weeks so here's a post on a couple of recent pieces created for BBC Science Focus. These two didn't quite make it past the gatekeepers this time but were a lot of fun to work on. 

The first is an animation for Focus' first digital only issue for Apple News on the theme of The Anti-Ageing Diet. With a short turnaround time I worked up a few approaches, including a futuristic food blender/clock concept and an animated female figure picking up diet items, pictured here. The latter was chosen for development and I set about sourcing and animating 3d rigged models of an older woman and a younger woman to create a de-ageing effect as the diet items are collected. I used Mixamo for walk and run cycle loops to apply to the 3d models in Cinema 4d then keyframed a camera move before taking it all in to After Effects to composite with all the other elements. Quite a complicated learning curve this one but was pleased with the results. Turned out Apple News had been working on their own animated cover  and ran with that one, using only a still from the animation in the end. These things happen.

The second unused illustration was for a potential Focus print ad to promote their own website on a laptop screen with an appreciative android giving the metal 'devil horns' hand gesture. Was not to be. See more work for Focus on the blog here. 

Dark Universe

Here's a new BBC Science Focus cover illustration and animation on the mysterious matter of The Dark Universe. The doozy of a brief involved visualising strange distortions in space and time that may reveal hidden forces controlling the cosmos. I was sent some specific reference of an abstract blob animation which was a helpful starting point for some exploration into Cinema 4D's volume builder dynamics. After some fun playing with various textures and organic animations I sent over first concepts, some of which are posted above. A stark and graphic black on white approach was preferred with a bulbous and jagged blob combo to give it an erratic feel. I was also tasked with creating headline typography that would interact with the undulating shape and added subtle grid elements to suggest an attempt to quantify the unquantifiable. The shape animation was created in Cinema 4d then composited in After Effects and was a very satisfying blob-job overall. See more Focus work here.

What's Next?

Here's my first post for 2024, a brand new cover illustration and animation for BBC Science Focus' 400th issue on What's Next? for science in our lifetimes. The brief was to design a bold typographic illustration to convey the wide variety of themes in the issue from Mars colonies to weight-loss pills. I set about creating 3d text in Cinema 4D and wanted there to be elements, such as the planet and brain, that would interact with the typography and the internal backdrop design that the font acts as a window into. Once we'd settled on a modern font that worked I created the illustration in Photoshop then animated the 3d models in Cinema 4d and composited it all together in After Effects for the Apple edition moving cover. Another satisfying commission for one of my favourite clients. You can see more Focus work on the main site here.

The AI Eagle Of Egypt

Here's a new animated editorial commission for Al Majalla on the current state of AI in Egypt.  I chose to use the eagle crest from the country's flag to symbolise the rise of AI and how it has been embraced by Egyptian youth. For the animation I modelled the eagle, rotating screens and brain in Cinema 4d and composited those with all the other elements in After Effects, adding music and sound effects to finish. You can see further work for Al Majalla here.