Category: Creations
Music, Writing, Photography, Film, more
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Looking Back
ORPHAN has been out for a couple of weeks now and is creeping humbly towards a thousand YouTube views across my channel and the band’s. Now the dust has settled, I look back at what worked well and what definitely did not. More than anything, I’m glad I got it done. Post-production, initially a daunting…
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Orphan is Out!
HeathenStorm Productions, in association with Dawn of Elysium, presents ORPHAN. A fast-paced journey into the cyberpunk future of another time, ORPHAN tells the story of Jane Doe, played by actress Aida Knight in her screen debut. Isolated and wandering the urban dystopia, haunted by a lonely childhood, she is drawn towards a glossy corporate clinic.…
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Chaos Reigns
After over three years of planning, filming, rethinking, and especially learning, I am pleased to declare my micro-budget sci-fi short ORPHAN is complete! Doubling up as a music video, the premiere will be over on Dawn of Elysium‘s YouTube channel. The first showing is Tuesday 22nd September at 18:00 UK time, and then it will…
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Scrapbook Challenge
Given a surplus of spare time of late, I’ve taken a critical look at the long-stalled Orphan project. An ambitious amalgam of music video and sci-fi short that has languished too long in production hell. Although filming proceeded apace a few years ago, setback after setback hit the schedule, especially when trying to secure a…
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Never Mind The Molochs
Back in March, the entire second year of the Academy’s Live Event Production course were assessed together across all disciplines. Tasked to put their fledgling talents to the test by collaborating on a video, lighting, and audio production with a live band. Although my (wall of) sound mixing skills were later channelled for indie-rockers Tummyache,…
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The Day the (SFX) Circus Came
Lancashire-based live effects wizards BPM SFX recently brought the heat to campus. With an incendiary portfolio including work with Sleep Token, Sum 41, and Oasis, they filled Studio 001 with stage-tech toys of varying lethality. The session gave (sensibly supervised) students a chance to play with professional kit that ran the gamut from innocuous confetti…
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Strands of Home
With a few days free between terms, I took a trip back to the homeland. To spend some time in Seaburn, near Sunderland, with the spring sun shining out across the strand and a balcony view in the middle of it all. Deliberately choosing to do very little, it was a chance to walk slowly…
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Fluidity
Now the rush of term-end is behind me, I can afford time to document some of the projects I’ve been up to between my Academy studies. FLUIDITY is an experimental short film improvised one weekend in February 2026 with the Academy of Live Technology’s Postgraduate cohort, at the behest of visiting Multimedia Artist-Engineer Diana Scarborough.…
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Seven years of Solstice
2018-2025 It is a great relief to finally declare my departure from Solstice. Although we went our separate ways last June, I chose to embargo any revelation until the band were good and ready to say it themselves. Nine months later, their Equinox announcement offers opportunity to reflect on the seven years I spent on…
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The Wizard of Speed and Time (1988)
Looking back to some cult 80s kino… Partly autobiographical, sometimes farce, The Wizard of Speed and Time follows emerald-clad director, writer, and stop-motion effects wiz Mike Jittlov’s attempts to break into Hollywood in the 1970s. It was different era of effects where everything was analogue. Film was shot by hand and tape reels spliced together,…
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She offers me projection
This is probably the first, last, and only time I’ll ever mention the former “Bad Boy” of “Pop”. A common motif scattered around the Academy campus is the visage of Robbie Williams. Site-based stage innovators TAIT have built scenery for his prior productions, with the larger than life result donated afterwards to make an effective…
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The Ruins of Beverast – Hamburg
A few weeks back, I crossed the sky to a snow-stricken Hamburg, honouring one of my favourite bands, The Ruins of Beverast, as they launched new album Tempelschlaf. Although the rigmarole of the journey is another story altogether, there remains much to be said about the gig itself. No stranger to shows in and around…