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I am a freelance animator and compositor with ten years experience in the industry. I have worked on hundreds of television commercials, TV idents and short films and am very experienced with Adobe After Effects. I am also an accomplished web designer and developer with 18 months online retail experience. In my spare time I write interactive fiction games (for which I have won competitions and been nominated for several awards) and have recently written and directed a short live action film, The Visitation starring Paul Darrow. |
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I have just completed work on Smoking, a short taster for the next episode of Lofty Life. Lofty Life is a an animated pilot directed by Josh Pulman and written by BAFTA award winning author Carole Hayman, best known for the radio and television series Ladies of Letters. The first episode was completed in 2005 with an award from the UK Film Council and has been screened at film festivals world wide, including the LA Film Festival, Raindance, Clermont Ferrand, Positano, Dublin, Leeds, Cambridge and Reading. I animated the new episode, cut-out style in Lost Marble's Anime Studio and composited in Adobe After effects. Character design is by Janet Cronin of Purple Ronnie fame, music and sound design by John Zorzi. Described on the official website, Lofty Life is a "grungy, sexy, rude, honest, free, fast-paced, surreal, radical ride through the Human Zoo. Urban myths and archetypes, 'through the looking glass' - Life as a comic soap opera." |
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Yak Shaving for Kicks and Giggles! started life as an entry to Abbi Park's Odd Comp, a competition for ADRIFT games in which authors have to work within a rather arbitrary set of restrictions. This proved to be a good thing as the restrictions actually forced me to get the job done! This new version however is fully expanded and written in Inform 7. You are Steve Goodwin. You're a regular guy, young, successful, dynamic. Recently promoted to the post of junior marketing executive at the Funhouse Novelty Company, you're the one who comes up with all those zany items you can buy for a Dollar in the pages of Cosmic Comics. But something is missing in your life. A nagging question gnaws at your soul, undermines your joy at your new-found success and interferes with the very business of living. But this is not a answer you can find in the pages of any book; for what you yearn to know is the very meaning of life itself! But then you learned about a man, a guru of great wisdom, endowed with the miraculous supreme realisation who could teach you the secrets of the universe. A six hundred year old hermit living at the top of a mountain in a kingdom most right-thinking people assume to be a myth. A man known as the Dada Lama! And this is why we find you now, after many months of journeying, of fruitless searching, beaten and battered by the uncaring elements, in this mysterious valley hidden deep within the mountains... ...the mystical valley of Shangri-La! Yak Shaving for Kicks and Giggles! is humorous quest for spirtual enlightenment involving a yak, a hairdryer and the abominable snowman. The game is nearly ready for release, but I need beta testers! If you would like to be a tester, email me at the address on my contact page. |
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The rather brilliant programmer Mark J. Tilford (a.k.a. Ralphmerridew) has created taf2inf, a Perl script that performs a simple ADRIFT to Inform conversion, and has used my game Goldilocks is a FOX! to demonstrate its power! The upshot of this is that a brand new, all bells and whistles version of the game is now available. The conversion required a significant amount of hand-coding to complete, giving us the opportunity to make a lot of improvements to the game, including Mark's new auto-mapping system. Staggering back from yet another wild student party, blonde bombshell Goldilocks decides to take a shortcut through the enchanted forest. All she really wants is a nice hot bowl of porridge and somewhere to sleep off her hangover - but something tells her that quaint little cottage isn't as innocent as it seems... Goldilocks is a FOX! is a zany romp through the world of fairytales. Along the way you'll meet a host of familiar characters, albeit not quite how you remember them! |
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The 8-bit Acorn Electron was my first ever computer; I taught myself to program in BBC Basic and even wrote a few text adventure games, most of which I never finished! Now, Dave Edwards, Electron enthusuast and head of the Electron User Group has converted my game To Hell in a Hamper to run on the Electron, BBC B, B+ and Master 128. The game was released with EUG #67, an issue of the online magazine for Electron users, and a review can be found at Acorn Electron World. The Electron port is a very faithful copy and Dave has done an amazing job of converting it to run on the 32k machine. Dave said: "I played the java version of it and, seeing as there were no rooms or maps, I thought it would be neat to put it onto the BBC/Elk as there's no adventure like it available for either. I have to say, as you can tell by the review, that I thought THIAH was terrific fun - very funny, and also a very good adventure for a complete beginner who might kind of think IF boring. It made me laugh out loud on many occasions!!" |
