one of the highlights of last year for me was walking the ridgeway, an 87 mile long hike following an ancient chalk ridge route used by prehistoric man. it was a truly inspiring place for photography. at the time i was starting to regret taking my girlfriends medium format camera besides my beloved olympus om10, but now looking back it was worth lugging that's chunky brick of a camera around.








black and white and medium format photography from the ridgeway 2008.


these two photographs below are clearly not from the ridgeway but at the beginning of one of the films, thought they were interesting and worth a look.









standing in the eye of the white horse on the hill. the mystery of why the horse was created still remains. it can only be seen fully from the air, so perhaps it was a sign to the ancient gods, or a mark of territorial ownership.

ernie balusha sculpture
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a turntable video of a character sculpted and painted in zbrush called ernie balusha

when i'm sculpting the silhouette is always my main focus. i love to have strong shapes and lines within the form of the peice that work with and sometimes against each other. i take the same approach with my sculpting as i do with drawing, painting or photography, you've got to have shapes and tones working off each other. i like to create contrast yet a natrual flow to the peice, with crisp lines working their way through the face. of course you're creating a character, it needs to come to life! its just amazing how the slightist tweak of the model can completely change the personality of the character, whether you shrink the eyes, push up the nose, strengthen the jaw, it never ends.

with this character, called dan, i sculpted him in mudbox, my preferred program. mudbox just seems to have more weight to it, you feel more like you're moving around clay rather the polygons. i'm not really into the whole super crazy high poly detail, i find it hard to get creatively excited about pours and ever little wrinkle.

these unfinished, untextured bust sculptures are more like 3d sketches, giving me a chance to try out different styles and ideas. there's not much planning invovled, a couple of quick drawings then i jump into mudbox with a very basic mesh of a head, and the peice just evolves.

this particular sculpture probably took about two hours.

dan - character sculpture turnaround
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a character sculpture called dan.

rex - character sculpture turnaround
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a character sculpture called rex.

this is a bust of a character i've been working on for a few days. for this piece i just jumped right in. there was no real aim with the character i just let it go, scribbling down some sketches over a few hours, then quickly built a simple mesh of a head in 3ds max, took it into mudbox and sculptured away for half a day. one thing i wanted to achieve with this piece was a design bordering somewhere between realistic and stylised.

Head sculpture turnaround
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goaf and twist chapter one
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the first chapter of a short but sweet animation involving a character called goaf.

these 'goaf' animations are an exercise for me to progress my skills as an animator.

sneeze
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backslider
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a balletic backwards gun fight.

backslider is a music video i made in college in 2001 with a couple of my friends. the core idea for the film was for the fight to almost play out as a dance. the film has been shown at the watershed cinema in bristol as well as on a bbc documentary called blast.

goaf, a simple, curious character, soon to
star in collection of short films, the first...
goaf & twist.

design work for the environment
for short film, 'ray's tree'.