This site collects thirty-odd years of making things with digital tools, and focuses on one idea that runs through all of it: that the audience should be invited to do half the work.
In 2014 a group of us made something nobody had before: the first feature in the UK shot entirely against green screen.
The film was The Knife That Killed Me. The company it accidentally produced was ViridianFX, which still exists in York, doing work I’m extremely proud of and which has no further place on this site. This is not a portfolio. The commercial work lives elsewhere, and there’s a link at the bottom for anyone who wants it.
I make films, interactive installations, video pieces and, lately, mixed-reality experiences. They look nothing like each other, but they do have one thing in common: all of them have been made with digital tools, often near the edge of what those tools can do. That isn’t a boast. It’s the whole difficulty. Congregation turned a public square into an impromptu theatre where the crowd was the performance. People We Love sat a single visitor in front of a single screen and asked them to imagine a stranger into being. Don Quixote puts you inside the frame rather than in front of it. The common thread isn’t a medium or a subject. It’s a contract — Laurence Sterne’s, two and a half centuries old — and I’ve never found a better way to put it than he did: leave the reader, the viewer, the visitor, something to imagine in their turn.
Here’s why the tools matter. Most of the screen culture I work near doesn’t keep that contract, and the medium is built to make breaking it easy. The mainstream VFX tradition (the one that pays Viridian’s bills, so I say this with full knowledge of my own position) runs on a quiet promise: trust us, none of this is constructed. The seams are hidden, the audience asked to believe and to sit still. Theatre makes the opposite offer. It admits the lie in the first breath: we both know this is a wooden stage and a painted cloth, and then, on that honest ground, builds something neither party could have built alone. I don’t make theatre. But it’s the proof I keep returning to: evidence that the honest contract works, that an audience told plainly it is looking at a construction will lean in rather than away. Almost everything on this site is an attempt to carry that offer into media that were engineered to refuse it, to keep the seam visible, using the very tools designed to hide it.
I don’t know whether the bet behind all this pays off. The wager is roughly that attention is where food was in the 1970s; that having industrialised it, salted and tinned it and made it frictionless, we’ll start, at least some of us, to want it grown with more care again. The plan is a map I expect to have to constantly redraw. But the work doesn’t depend on the forecast. I’d be making it either way, because it’s the work my curiosity keeps drawing me back to.
The medium keeps changing. The contract is the part that doesn't.