Six studios. Twenty years. One thread running through all of it.

Co-founded Blowfish Studios in 2010 as a two-person indie outfit, off the back of a small mobile hit called Qbism. Over the next 14 years, we grew it into a studio of 40+ artists across 2D, 3D, animation, UI/UX, and audio, self-publishing 10+ original titles, shipping 15+ client projects for the likes of Apple, Google, Sega, Microsoft and Nvidia, and publishing 25+ indie titles through our own label.

• Shipped our first titles across Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch
• Kept a Scholastic USA title running continuously for over 10 years
• Won NSW Export Awards for Small Business (2016, 2019) and Creative Industries (2017)
• Raised US$19.3M in 2022 for Phantom Galaxies, our Web3 AAA sci-fi title built on Unreal
• Acquired by Animoca Brands in 2021, pivoting the studio into blockchain gaming — and selling $20M in virtual land along the way

Beyond creative direction, I wore whatever hat the studio needed — executive producer, studio manager, HR — while building and mentoring the leadership team that made this possible (Damien Mahoney, Suzan James, Stephanie Rudkin, Jake, Sheree Fiala among them).

Headhunted to The Mill's LA studio — the number-one post-production company in the world at the time — as VFX Supervisor and Massive Technical Director. The studio was still small then, around twenty people; it's 300+ today. Worked under Head of 3D John Leonti on commercials for directors including Roman Coppola, Jake Scott, and Joe Pytka.

In 2010, I won a D&AD Yellow Pencil Award — one of the industry's most prestigious honours — for my work as 3D VFX Supervisor on Grizzly Bear's "Two Weeks" music video. The role otherwise mixed hands-on supervision with mentoring: training junior artists, running workflows, and being the person other leads came to when a shot wasn't working technically or creatively.

Freelanced here through one of the worst hiring freezes the VFX industry had seen — the 2008 Hollywood writers' strike had just gutted London's major post houses. It was a small, scrappy shop with none of the pipeline overhead I was used to, which meant getting hands-on with Mental Ray shading, look development, and Realflow fluid simulations directly. No safety net, just getting shots out and making them look good.

My second stint at Fin came after building (and surviving) Collider — I came back to take a commercial start-to-finish, working off a laptop borrowed from my own lead because there wasn't a spare desk in the building. It set the tone: I was more confident this time, and I started building things beyond the work itself, including a frame-buffer render management system that functioned like Maya Render Layers before Maya had render layers — it saved the studio a serious amount of rendering time.

That habit of building tools led to one of the harder problems I've solved: given four weeks to learn Massive (the crowd-simulation software behind the battle scenes in Lord of the Rings), integrate it into our pipeline, and deliver 20+ shots of a packed stadium for A League's TV commercial. We shipped it on deadline.

Brought in to build Collider's VFX department from the ground up, with no existing team or pipeline to inherit — just a director with a strong slate of VFX-heavy commercials lined up. Recruited Damien Mahoney, a former Plastic Wax colleague, to help get it off the ground, and later brought in Hugh Carrick-Allan before moving on. The first six months were some of the most intense, high-output work of my career.

My first industry job, landed after a year of self-taught 3D animation. Worked on in-game animation cycles and cutscenes for Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon — a chaotic, fun crew, and the first time the work felt genuinely worth doing.