animator | illustrator
Banging the drum for companies, charities and organisations, to help them tell their stories.
About me
I am driven by creating purposeful work that makes a difference. I enjoy working together with my clients to bring their ideas to life with the aim to bring about awareness and create change.
Bringing a purposeful story to life in a short animation using my illustrated characters, can really capture who you are as an organisation and what you want to say. I like to get to know my clients and understand the story they want to tell and the message they want to send. I aim to help my clients build connection and trust with their audience and create animations that make a difference.
I often work with subjects that may have a sensitive nature and can be portrayed through characters rather than real life people. Animation is a great tool for this. I also love to bring a sense of humour into my animations when it is appropriate. I find a good sense of timing is always important with my work. Whatever the story, allowing enough space is key.
In my spare time I love playing music - guitar, bass guitar and drums. I play in my local church. When I was a teenager I realised that my two main passions in life were art and music and I’m continually learning how to get better at both of these. This is where I feel animation brings many of my skills together.
Meet Mr Slop, he’s an AI trawl bot
I'm proud to say all my work is created by me from my creative, human brain.
From thinking to sketching ideas and developing them, it comes from me. If I need to draft out a storyboard I draft it out sketching my ideas. Developing and refining them is all part of the process. I don't use AI functionality within software.
For animation projects where I need a voice over, I use a real voice over artist. I collaborate to achieve an end result a client expects.
I am human and it is important to me to build a relationship with my clients and not put AI slop in front of them.
Mr Slop - he can't draw, he can't be creative or original. He trawls the internet scraping and stealing copyrighted work from artists, illustrators and creatives without permission. His mission is to scrape enough data as he can in broad daylight. Stick it in a big data mixing bowl, spit out AI slop and try to charge people for what is known as stolen goods, or when I was young the term was ‘off the back of a lorry’!
He was created by big tech with a business model of stealing copyrighted work to train their models in order to generate AI imagery. This is called copyright infringement, taking someone else’s intellectual property. Unfortunately there currently isn’t government legislation in place to stop him.
The sad reality is, most of us artists can't claim our work has been scraped as they have stolen from so many 1000s of artists worldwide that a generated piece is a mix of so many artists’ work.
However, times are changing, government legislation is taking shape around AI and copyright with the work of the AOI (Association of Illustrators) and many other trade bodies. Just like we are seeing legislation taking shape around children’s mobile phones and social media with the great work from Smartphone Free Childhood, it will happen with AI.
AI is also becoming extremely expensive and not viable or cost effective. The large industrial data centres are also extremely bad for the environment which makes them very unpopular when many of us are environmetally conscious.
I would never put my faith in large tech companies. As a Christian I put my faith in God, the sustainer and creator of the amazing world we all live in. He made each one of us individually and to use our gifts, which is what I'm trying to do and to get better at each day!
Learn More
To find out more about the great campaigning work that the AOI (Association of Illustrators) are doing for illustrators, animators and the wider creative community on this matter please visit:
My trade association
