Offices

Going forward I'm still going to be taking on animation contract work. However, on August 18th I had what I'm expecting will be my last day of animation work out of someone's offices. Working in-house has become rarer, especially since COVID, as animation has increasingly been done remotely. Nevertheless, it has been a consistent feature of my life since 1994 as I worked out of advertising agencies, film companies, post-production facilities, "new media" outlets, events organisations, branding consultancies, and design agencies. On the other hand, as a Design and Technology teacher I will now be "in-house" every single day. As you can imagine that's going to take some adjusting to. I've spent the past year getting my head around it.

Before this last job got confirmed, in which for one of the five days I dropped into the office at Great Pulteney Street, I had planned to take an afternoon visiting the significant offices in London I have worked in over the years. Because no-one is going to give me Rolex watch and pat me on the back for all my years of service, and it's still necessary to process these things. As I plotted out my ritualised itinerary I came to realise that almost all of the companies I was going to visit had either shut down or moved elsewhere. In some cases entire buildings had been demolished. The only tangible thing was a sensation of impermanence. In the end I decided it was futile idea.

Around the corner from where I was in Soho on Tuesday were the offices of RSA Films Ltd. This was the director Ridley Scott's advertising production company and where, between 1994 and 1995, I had my first full-time job. I later did some animation work out of the building. On Beak Street, it's not supposed to be empty apparently. Perhaps the main offices are now on the higher floors? But it certainly looks deserted in 2026. The ground floor was always the nerve centre back then. Looking through the windows at the abandoned space it's bittersweet to remember all the drama that once unfolded there.

 

Tariq Goddard: Publishing

How often in a lifetime does a person stumble into the middle of a cultural event? Very few people have a knack of, again and again, finding themselves at the centre of SOMETHING. Eno is the textbook example of someone who had either the ingenuity, or luck, to pull this off. But most of us mortals count ourselves very fortunate to get even a single brush with a cultural moment. For me the opportunity to have two books published by Repeater was just such an opportunity.

Tariq Goddard first approached me in 2008 to write a book. That was before the publication of Mark Fisher's classic "Capitalist Realism" (2009). Tariq's generous interest in me came on the back of my blog WOEBOT. However, at that point I was slightly less focused on writing. I was animating, closely involved in bringing up my children, and making music, so I turned him down - and palmed him off with Marcello Carlin.

I subsequently got to know Tariq a bit. He is a profoundly charismatic, at once sweet, but also somehow brutal, individual. I always found him enchanting; possibly in spite of himself. Tariq tried again in 2015 to sign me up. But it wasn't until 2017 that I finally got around to pitching Repeater the idea for "Retreat" which was eventually published in 2020. I followed that with "The Garden" in 2025. I can't imagine ever having had the opportunity to publish those two large books were it not for the break he gave me.

Tariq himself has been an author of fiction; a very high class one. I've relished the two of his books I've read, "High John the Conqueror" (2022), and his magnum opus "Nature and Necessity" (2017). So it's something of a mystery how he became such a dramatically effective, even revolutionary, book publisher. If he'd been a radical community organiser, the eccentric and profligate heir of a fortune, or an entrepreneurial fugitive from conventional publishing, ending up at the helm of the imprints of zero and Repeater might have made more sense.

As becomes clear in the compulsively addictive nonfiction study "Publishing" he has penned for the North American Duke University Press, part of their "Practices" series, it's precisely this understanding of fiction, that most impractical form of writing, that placed him so well to understand the essential nature of writing itself. Understanding writing as he did enabled him to understand that near-autistic breed, authors.

"Publishing" has a tripartite structure. Ranged around lucid meditations upon Reading, Writing, and Wondering - which Tariq argues as being essential, interdependent processes - he gives us the vicarious thrill of a look behind the scenes into that world in which he was apex and linchpin. As exciting as it sounds, it was evidently in equal measures frustrating, infuriating, and unnerving.

Whenever I think of Tariq I immediately flash on the great entrepreneurs of Independent music: Alan McGee, Geoff Travis, Ed Bahlman, and Richard Russell. That's to do with his wholly innovative mapping of the business and aesthetic principles of those record company pioneers across onto book publishing. Did anyone ever do this before? Not as far as I'm aware... But it's also a reflection on his large and tremendously healthy ego. Naturally, the person who immediately springs to mind is Factory records supremo Tony Wilson. There's an accompanying sadness that that makes my dear old friend Mark Fisher his symbolic counterpart as Joy Division's Ian Curtis. Even when Mark was still with us, apparently that was a comparison he loved.

16 Greatest Hits

Recently I wrote a post about the English Animation which inspired me to become an animator, and in the introduction I shared some of the animations I had made. A motive to writing that, and continuing in this vein, is that I'm in the process of switching careers. I will still be doing some animation on the side - but henceforth I can't see it being my primary occupation. So I am, in a sense, coming to terms with that shift. I thought I would follow those quite home-spun projects with a selection of the best commercial work I have done for for clients.

As a caveat before I get into this - there are many projects that I feel blessed to have been closely involved with over the years but for which I can't claim significant stylistic input. I've done a lot of work for a lovely company called PRISM but, in the way of things, I've often been in a supporting role there, working in the shadows. I did a number of animations at Intro with Mat Cook and Julian House but in that situation I was mostly just engineering or executing their vision. Likewise for many years I worked for the advertising agency VCCP - but mainly doing "cleanup" compositing work - so there's not much to show for that effort. The Colorcalm film I made working with Peter Saville, who I remember getting to sign a copy of Joy Division's "Closer" for Mark Fisher, was a highlight but where the resulting film isn't worth sharing.

Channel 4 "Beer"

Twenty three years ago in December 2003 my very first professional animation work had been for a company called Blue Source in Notting Hill Gate. The studio had a working relationship with the group Coldplay. I think they must have been the band's friends before they broke. However, I never personally worked on any Coldplay videos. Honest guv! Lol. Although actually I don't mind Coldplay at all - it's only Trendy Wendys who get their knickers in a twist about them.

My introduction to Blue Source came from the salesman who sold us both the very first copies of Final Cut Pro available in the UK. At Blue Source I met a really talented art director, something of a future star, called Joe Burrin. Joe introduced me and got me in at a company called Spin. This, in May 2004, was where it all took off for me.

Spin, run by Tony Brook and his wife Patricia Finegan, were a big deal because they had won a BAFTA for a Channel 4 ident with flocking birds. It was significant because it was a notable collision of the worlds of pure graphic design and TV. Tony, a music aficionado and highly-respected historian of graphic design, had pitched the idea for a Friday night ident of a pan over a wall of fizzing lager to the TV channel. That's all I had to go on - no layouts or anything.

I organised a small shoot in the Spin studios at Oval and using those assets pulled the film together. I roto'd out some bubble "streams" and with some streams I actually animated the bubbles myself. I added touches like the shadows of people walking in the background to break things up. It was quite simple to do, but I did it elegantly and the result was very effective. This was one of the rare things that I had done which people actually saw! It blows my mind that I still have the original QuickTime file for this - I've always been careful to archive my work.

Mr. Wright Title Sequence

This small job came through my connections in advertising production. My friend the producer Lynne Hurley said her pal Jacqui at the agency Mugshots had made a film, a gay romance, and that she was looking for a title sequence. This was a nice opportunity for me to art direct something myself - because a lot of the time I worked with designers and animated assets for them.

Today, of course, many designers are reasonably good animators themselves. But twenty years ago Adobe After Effects was forbiddingly complex to people used to Quark and Freehand. Nowadays there are online courses like School of Motion and colleges like Ravensbourne which churn out people with these skills.

I found a website which was licensing old wallpapers, bought this lovely font, and arranged a video shoot with the actors which I storyboarded beforehand. I remember that I caused a lot of discomfort to the actors by suggesting that (as silhouettes!) they kiss - and I think we avoided this. I never really understood why that was a problem... 

Practice Hours Grime DVD

This was possibly the earliest opportunity I had to use my animation skills in the context of things which fascinated me personally. In 2006 I reached out to a guy called Troy Miller who was the mastermind behind the early Grime DVDs and offered to make a slick menu system for his latest DVD. I remember Troy coming around to see me at our house on Old Street. I'd never done something like this before but it worked really well.

Gorillaz "El Manana"

In October 2005 I got the call from an agency informing me that a company called "Zombie Flesheaters" needed urgent help. I didn't really know who they were, but realised when I showed up in Shepherds Bush that it was Gorillaz.

I worked with Jamie Hewlett who had been struggling to get the effect of one of his drawings "drawing on" as the track played. They had been trying to do it in Shake (at the time the equivalent of The Foundry's Nuke software). It's an effect that's actually very difficult to achieve with such a complex drawing in Adobe After Effects. I brought my own Mac along and used the elegant rotoscoping software called Commotion to record me rubbing away the individual lines. Then we played the result backwards.

I remember Damon Albarn showing up one day and everyone watched Little Britain's parody sketch of Blur together. In the studio they played classic rock 24/7 - Bowie, Zep, Beatles. It was a fun scene and although I've never really been a fan of Gorillaz I still like 'em. This film was eventually used as a backdrop at Gorillaz Live in Manchester which was put on DVD.

SONY "High Definition"

I met a lovely and very talented guy called Paul McGeoch working at an agency in Soho and Paul got me involved on this SONY job in 2010. This was a hugely significant moment for me because it was working for the director Johnny Hardstaff who was based at RSA Films. I had left Ridley Scott Associates under a huge cloud in 1995. I had worked there as a runner (detailed in my post on The Black Dog) and it had all gone pear-shaped. Indeed shortly after I left, the whole company got turned upside down. There was definitely a chaotic atmosphere there at the time.

When Paul let me know about the job I sent a message to the then CEO Kai and told her that I was coming in - but that I would be on my best behaviour. I maybe should have told Paul? I reasoned that if Kai didn't want me there then she could easily deal with it - and I wanted the opportunity to redeem myself. It was incredibly moving for me to be back in the RSA Films offices. I had worked there straight out of university for two years. It's still the only place that I have ever had a full-time job. I'm not sure what the reason was but Ridley Scott, who I had met once before when I was there in the nineties, dropped by our office and kind of gestured at me. He doesn't speak much to underlings! It seemed somehow significant to me - like he had been alerted (or warned...) I was going to be there. A little context, in case this seems somehow inflated, I did get to know both his sons Jake and Luke a little when I working there.

Johnny Hardstaff the director was riding high on videos for Radiohead and Bjork. He's an incredibly gifted director, and Paul, a redheaded Scot, is also fantastic. However, I do have my fingerprints on a lot of this - I built CG in Autodesk Maya like the camera and device which removes the pin in the shelves (I remember being really pleased with the spring), and I did a lot of the compositing in After Effects. There was some production controversy - SONY were not pleased with there being machines they hadn't designed in the adverts - and there was a last minute tussle with the music licensing. AC/DC had asked for a million quid - so they had to switch the music. To this day they are stunning adverts.

Science Museum Launchpad

I don't know exactly how I got involved in this in 2007. Somehow my name got through to Harry Pearce at the legendary design agency Pentagram. I went along to a meeting at their beautiful old offices in Notting Hill Gate. There, with Pearce, I met Tim Molloy who was the Creative Director at the Science Museum. I remember them saying we have X amount of money only - can you do it for that?

I shot the young people myself on DV and I must have worked it up using some layouts from Pentagram themselves. It's a nice film but I've always felt that it is technically flawed and I could have improved upon it. The launch was a slightly awkward event too because there were some complicated vibes. Mainly it was a great opportunity for me - even if it did play for many years at the Science Museum. 

BFI Horror Season

One of the most lovely design companies I worked for was Village Green. This spot was designed by the genius Peter Richardson, but I remember bringing a lot to it with the cut-out animation-style and the visual effects. Pete also designed a cute bicycle called the Wren.

Muppets

When I made these Muppets spots for Disney in 2011 my children were 7 and 10 and, not only were they glued to the Disney channel, they also loved the Muppets movie which came out that year. Consequently making these films was a big kick for me. They got to see my work on the telly and it made me a bit of hero at home at that magical period in their childhood.

All I had to work with on these on were some random shots of the Muppets against green screen (some of which I layered up into groups) and I came up with the idea of these backgrounds (which I built in Maya). This would have played out with music but like a number of these archived films I am sharing the music has gone AWOL or I never had it in the first place.

Google Express

For eight years I worked as a freelance Motion Graphics Designer at a company called Wolff Olins. This was a very cool company and at the time they were the cutting-edge branding agency in the world. They built that eminence not so much on design - and the design WAS exquisite - but rather on strategy. Something of an intellectual organisation, in heavily researching a client's accounts and their market data they sought fresh channels of communication to their customers. This is as opposed to doing what many design companies do, which is come up with some pretty-looking fluff.

As a result their work could often look weird in the context of the design world. This is because WO wasn't kowtowing to trends. The best example of how the work could land oddly is the famous branding they gave to the London Olympics. They'd just done that when I started to work for them. Soon after that came their branding for Wacom which was also controversial.

The company had a unusually creative vibe. It was a bit more like a wacky sixties art school than a design agency. When I was working at Wolff Olins I met some really beautiful people: Karl Sadler. Sandy Suffield. Leanne Bentley. Jody Hudson-Powell. Oliver Heifrich. Rejane Dal Bello. Sophie Paynter. The company had been swallowed up by the monstrous WPP in 2001 and yet it seems like they kept their independent spirit for a long time. However, towards the end of the period I worked there the atmosphere began to change. They moved out of their offices on the Caledonian Road, where they had their own delicious canteen, and one by one the people I knew and respected all moved on.

I worked for so many different high-profile clients for Wolf Olins and the work was always fresh and interesting. For many years I wasn't able to share what I did for the company because it was all heavily covered by Non-Disclosure Agreements. Looking back now I wonder if that damaged my career to some extent? One job I did for them which I particularly like was this for Google Express in 2016. I remember designing and animating it - and also working up all these beautiful behaviours for the parachute too.

Innerpeffray Library

Someone I've worked with on multiple occasions over the years is the director Jonty Toosey. We go way back to my days at art school when I first met him. This job in 2013 came through Jonty - a promotional animation for this library which was of central importance to The Scottish Enlightenment. I think that we must have flown to Edinburgh together and got the train up to Crieff.

Once there I took painstaking measurements of the whole library - all the shelves, tables, and books - and with the help of the friendly librarian we photographed imagery from the books. Then back home I reconstructed the library in CG in Autodesk Maya. The voice-over was done by the great Scottish actor Dennis Lawson. What a lovely project to work on!

Learn Amp

This job from 2018 has a special place in my heart. I'd always wanted to do a proper 2D animation like I had often made for myself - but within a professional context. I really thought that this would be a good direction to steer my career! However, this ended up being one of the most stressful jobs I ever worked on. The client had what I think were unreasonably high expectations (I remember them showing me the equivalent of Pixar movies as a reference) and no experience at all commissioning animation. They were borderline appalled by what I did - but to this day I think it's great! Oh well!

Mozilla

This from 2016 was an absolute dream job. I'm a diehard fan of the company - Firefox and Thunderbird all the way. I'd worked with a lovely person called Leanne Bentley at Wolff Olins and when she moved to Johnson Banks she gave me the nod.

I worked for the genius Michael Johnson there at his company as a freelancer for many years on all kinds of wonderful ethical accounts (which are his specialty). It's a shame I don't get any work from them these days - but new creatives bring new animators with them and the wheel keeps turning.

ArtFund Animations 2016-2020

ArtFund came to me originally through my friend from Wolff Olins, Rejane Dal Bello who, since I've known her, has become a design world superstar. I never worked with Rejane for them but I think she worked up their brand when she was at Wolff Olins.

I did many many short animations for ArtFund which were informed by the brand's excellent design aesthetic. I always enjoyed carefully tailoring these exquisitely clean animations for them. It was nice to be working too for a brand which was doing such a great service in the world.

I've not often worked for toxic brands - but sometimes it was inevitable! And gotta say, right or wrong, usually I've been able to rationalise what they were trying to achieve in the marketplace. I find it hard to cast the first stone. However, I have on a couple of occasions ducked out of jobs I thought were unethical - one car company I remember asking me remove exhaust fumes from the footage of their vehicles... Nope!

Vodafone MWC

This was for the advertising agency Ogilvy that I always get a kick out of working for. That's probably because when I was researching my comic book TPM I read "Ogilvy On Advertising". Just this year I've done work for the brands Viasat and Chep for them.

This was made in 2024 just before WPP shrunk the company - a consolidation which came owing to the headwinds which have affected the traditional advertising model. WPP overall cut 7,000 jobs between June 2024 and June 2025.

The challenge here was primarily technical in VFX - getting very solid matchmove tracking done on stock footage not shot with that in mind, and making convincing-looking CG elements.

NSSIF

I did this working for my dear brother Toby Ingram for his company Scarlett. I think of all the films here in this 16 Greatest Hits this is the work I am most proud of. I designed all the layouts myself and worked up visual concepts which did Toby's script justice. I'd love to do more of this kind of work!

P-POD

And finally a favourite from 2024! Researching my book "The Garden" I visited the New Alchemy Institute in Cape Cod. I fell in love with Hilde Maingay and Earle Barnhart there, and after lunch in their greenhouse volunteered to make a free animation for them.

I really pulled out the stops and although I wasn't charging them I'm proud that I worked very hard. We got through a number of revisions until they were happy. Of course, this is the kind of far-out product that the arsenal of advertising should be promoting. I was really pleased with the way the film came out.

-

Over the past quarter of a century I've had some wonderful times working as a Motion Graphics Designer. It has been really special to dig into my archives and re-present these old films. Gotta say I don't think any of them have dated particularly which is a testament to the good work wot I done. I'd like to give a sincere "Thank you" to all the clients who placed their confidence in me over the years.

Oliver Postgate's Satori

Recently surveying the British animation which inspired me I found myself discussing the films of Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin.

 

I read some fascinating things about Postgate and his family's Socialist background and felt compelled to learn more about him so I picked up his autobiography first published in 2000.

I was delighted to discover that the copy I found on eBay was signed by Postgate himself and also included two Small Films postage stamps (not pictured) of Bagpuss and Ivor the Engine.

I've come quite a long way from the subject matter of my book "Retreat" (2020) so was really surprised to discover in the last fifth of the book that Postgate experienced a massive satori. After a medical operation, and apparently not owing to any medication, he elaborates:

This was not a day one would take much notice of in the ordinary way, but I think I was seeing it all for the first time in my life. No more than that did I see, but what I saw there was so clear and complete, with a beauty so simple and essential, that I was poleaxed with amazement...I was there for, maybe, five minutes, but those five minutes held eternity in every direction. First there was beauty. Everything I saw was no more than what it was, but, as it was, it possessed, was part of, a single clear essence of itself, and of everything else. (Oh dear, words!)

The experience was totally life-changing:

What hit me then was a realisation that this joy in life that drives through all things is the life that drives all things... I knew that I was seeing clearly for the first time in my life...seeing how things are... the beauty was was so clear, so complete and safe, and the relief so profound, that with an almost physical release I let go and gave myself entirely to the enjoyment, to the sheer delight of seeing... I knew I had found the central truth that, without knowing it, my life had been spent seeking.

Oliver isn't shy about sharing the experience with people and they all thing he's barking mad. His son Kevan, however, had just returned from India and an ashram and was able to shed some light on the situation:

He was deeply delighted and glad for me, telling me that I had inadvertently fallen into a state of non-being that is the goal of spiritual development. We had a very happy time together, a time for which I was particularly grateful because I was beginning to need some reassurance. Prue [his wife] had let it be known, in the nicest possible way, that she had heard quite enough about the ecstasy...

Margate by Bike

I serviced my scruffy old bike entirely myself for the first time. I fitted a new cassette, new chain, and I replaced the worn rear tyre.

 

Then, ready, over Easter I set off east. I cycled past Whitstable and stayed at a campsite between Whitstable and Margate for two nights. I spent a day checking out Margate. On the way back I went via Canterbury and got a train home from there.

 

It's been something I have been meaning to do for some time. It was exhilarating to leave home with everything I needed and hit the road.

 

British Animation of my Childhood

As the curtain falls at the end of an era of animation I thought I would reflect on the reasons why I originally got into this line of work. I thought it would be an opportunity to touch on what inspired me to animate in the first place.

I've been an animator for 36 years since I made The Verucca Boy [1990] on my bedroom dresser. Whilst at Glasgow University I pitched the story to the Film & TV faculty and, in winning the McTaggart Prize, secured a small amount of money to make it. It was shot on Super 8 film.

After a stretch concentrating on drawing comics, Road [1999] was my first foray into animating in the digital realm. I taught myself After Effects 3.0 so as to be able to make this animation. Acquiring that skill led to a long career working with design companies, post-production houses, and advertising agencies.

I've absolutely loved working with After Effects all these years. Along the way I picked up other animation software, notably Nuke, Maya, and Cinema 4D, but After Effects was my gateway to practicing animation as a paying job. That's kept bread on the table for twenty five years while I have, not just made a bunch of animations, but pontificated about music, set up a forum, spewed out a series of albums, and written some books.

The legendary creative director Paul Arden was a fan of Road and as result I was signed up as a director to his production company, Arden Sutherland-Dodd.

Made with Lightwave, Curry [2001] was a 3d animation about a Vampire buying a curry. I'd completely forgotten about this one.
 

In spite of animation providing me with employment, I always nursed an ambition to bring my own drawn world alive. Pussy is a Star [2002] was an attempt to achieve that. It was pitched to a cable TV channel as a pilot for a series called "Party Animals".

The film was the fruit of a year I spent studying traditional cel animation at St Martins Art School's London Animation Studios - flicking sheets of paper by hand. I did the drawing here digitally though - directly into RETAS with a Wacom Tablet. For many years I dreamed of becoming Old Street's answer to Matt Groening.

Methuselah [2009], which I made for the WOEBOT.tv series was, I thought, very beautiful. However, at once cute and uncomfortably obscene, I think it proved difficult to swallow. Made in Toon Boom Studio.

Rave Bum [2012] was a pop video for one of the tracks off my album "Hallo".

Vitamin C [2016]

Vitamin C was the last animation I made purely for myself and not for work. If The Verucca Boy was my homage to Morph, Vitamin C was my tribute to John Ryan (the Pugwash sailors had a cameo). Both Ryan and Peter Firmin were acknowledged in its credits. The staging of the twenty-minute animation on a theatre set that was physically consistent was my attempt to ground the film in the same "degree-zero" creativity that I also appreciate in stage plays. 

After Vitamin C – in part from a sense of failure – I stopped working on my own animations and concentrated on three books, "Retreat" [2020], "The "S" Word" [2022], and "The Garden" [2025]. I did keep my drawing hand "in" with the comic book "TPM" [2022].

Nanobanana and Google Photos

When running some tests with Nanobanana in ComfyUI I asked it to make a picture of a grey cat drinking from a hosepipe on a slate roof. This is because the grey cat asks me to turn the tap on for her every morning. What alarmed me were the slate roof tiles in the result. Obviously I can't prove it, but I'm reasonably certain that these have been scraped from the multiple pictures of my own garden roof terrace in Google Photos.

Google emphatically deny that they have trained their AI on Google Photos. They say, "We don't train any generative AI models outside of Google Photos with your personal data in Google Photos." However, the wording here FEELS slippery. The phrase "with your personal data" might imply that the photos could be "anonymised" - stripped of geographical information etc. Or perhaps when they have trained the models inside Google Photos they then take the models and use them elsewhere? That would also satisfy that wording. [Edit: Maybe because some of these pictures were on Sick Veg - a WordPress remotely hosted website - they were scraped from there?] 

They certainly leapt far ahead of the pack with Nanobanana and Veo, and it's tempting to conclude that they allowed themselves to train their models on Google Photos. I'm sure that if I went through the fine print I would find that by using this service (even though I have paid for it for years with Google Workspace...), I had surrendered my rights to this data for their purposes.

Certainly there's an irony to me posting this on Google's Blogger (the original Sick Veg blog posts were all on WordPress so that's not the leak). But I would argue that what one posts on Blogger and YouTube is by definition for public consumption. It's a very tiny drama, but one which is so personal to me that it feels like an infringement on what is sacred.

AI Cat.

Real cats.