Animation
Exploring the Multiverse…
Cleo is the Queen of Space was my lockdown project: a six-part original stop-motion animated series, aimed at young adults around my age who had grown up with the same fun and whimsical Saturday morning cartoons as me, but were older now and wanted something that dealt with slightly more mature themes (while not dragging down the fun spacey stories too much.) Four episodes were eventually completed before the world returned to normal and the demands of adult life once again entered the fray.
The series follows Cleo, a college freshman on a personal journey of discovery after she was abandoned by her biological father, finding a magic sword that takes her on a trip across the Multiverse. Along the way, she meets people in distress and uses what she learns to right the wrongs she encounters. In this instalment, she finds herself aboard a crashing space freighter and meets a space pirate who might just hold a lot of the answers she’s searching for…
Warping reality…
This video was part of a New Year campaign for Camp America, a cultural exchange program that sends people from across the world to work on an American summer camp. The brief was to create a stylistic video that would evoke the making of new memories in the year to come, so we decided upon creating a stop-motion film based around a scrapbook. All the photos and scraps are real, from our team’s experiences taking part in the program over summers gone by.
This type of hyper-realistic stopmotion was entirely new territory for me, and definitely a learning experience in continuity and creating seamless movement.
Embracing the surreal…
Doctor Who: The Dark Ages began as part of a collaborative project in which I and a number of other online creators reimagined the legacy BBC sci-fi series for ourselves and brought our own stories to life with stop-motion animation. After ten years of creating these stories, I realised they had become so far removed from the canon of the source material that it only made sense to give the adventure its own genesis. This is how it began.
For this project, I wanted the style of each episode to reflect the Doctor slowly regaining his sense of self as he tries to recover his lost memories. This first instalment, for instance, is very much based on the earliest episodes of the TV series from the mid-1960s, though reality slowly bleeds in.
Feeling something…
Another Camp America project - this began with a brief to create a centrepiece for a seasonal marketing campaign including emails and social media activity, all linking back to a core message as told in a John Lewis-esque Christmas ad format.
In particular I took inspiration from John Lewis’ 2012 ad The Bear and the Hare and classic stop-motion Christmas movies such as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Raindeer, bringing a story of friendship and togetherness to life in a charming medium that many have come to associate with the warm and cosy sensation of the holidays.