Two decades in the trenches — VFX, games, and everything between.

I was diagnosed with dyslexia at around nine or ten years old. At the time, I didn't really understand what it meant — I just remember sitting through tests, being handed tinted plastic overlays for reading, and being told a string of things that felt strange and made very little sense to a kid that age. When I changed schools not long after, my parents never mentioned the diagnosis to the new school, so there was no special treatment waiting for me there. I ended up in the lowest stream for English, and I was pretty average — if not subpar — at spelling, geography, history, and languages. Maths, oddly, was the one subject I was genuinely fine at.

Years later, in high school, I sat an IQ test and did surprisingly well — far better than I expected, given the dyslexia. Looking back, I think it was because the test leaned heavily on puzzle-solving rather than reading comprehension: patterns, logic, equations. Whatever kind of intelligence that test was measuring, it was the kind my brain seemed built for. I didn't know it yet, but that was probably the first real clue about where my career would end up.

My journey starts at Short Fuse Animation, a small animation company run by an eccentric owner and his wife. I was hired as a production assistant and graphic designer, and it's there that I met an animator named Matt Estela — sharp, funny, and genuinely talented. Despite my plans to attend Vancouver Film School, Matt convinced me to teach myself using the internet of the early 2000s. It sounded like a reasonable idea, so I left and locked myself away.

What I thought would take a couple of months turned into about a year — lurking on forums, buying books from Amazon, learning everything I could while building a showreel, and probably playing a little too much World of Warcraft along the way. Eventually I surfaced with something worth showing and landed my first industry job at Plastic Wax as a 3D Animator.

Plastic Wax was a dynamic crew producing animation for a video game called Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon. It was a great environment — the first time I felt genuinely passionate about the work I was doing. I'd cross paths with several of these colleagues again later in my career.

Once that project wrapped, I left Plastic Wax with a rough showreel in hand and landed a role at Fin Design & Effects. Fin operated on a different level entirely — high-end, fast-paced post-production work. My lead, Stuart White, was a genuinely sharp mentor who taught me values I still hold today. The first commercial I worked on at Fin was the Toyota Kluger campaign — possibly one of the first full-CG car commercials on Australian television, if not the world.

Having just worked on what was, at the time, a groundbreaking commercial, I was offered a full-time position. Less than a year earlier, I'd been teaching myself 3D from my basement.

I worked on a run of strong commercials, and each job brought new challenges and new things to learn. This is where I found my true calling. Despite the dyslexia, or perhaps because of the way it shaped my brain, I had a genuine aptitude for problem-solving, and an unexpected appreciation for mathematics — the same puzzle-solving instinct that IQ test had picked up on years earlier, now finally put to use.

One of the sought-after directors at the time was Joel Pront. I'd worked on several of his commercials and gotten to know him well. He was setting up his own post-production company and asked if I'd help build his visual effects team, backed by a strong pipeline of VFX-heavy commercials.

Joining Collider Film to build their VFX department from scratch was a genuine challenge. I didn't have the support, experience, or leadership structure I'd had at Fin — I was jumping straight into the deep end. What I needed was someone willing to take this on with me, someone I trusted to put in the hard work alongside me. That person was Damien Mahoney, a former colleague from Plastic Wax — hardworking, grounded, and an excellent collaborator. For the first six months, we delivered strong work. Had Damien not come on board, I doubt the department would have gotten off the ground.

I eventually felt my time at Collider was coming to an end, just as other freelance opportunities began appearing. Before I left, though, I brought in another former Plastic Wax colleague, Hugh Carrick-Allan — a genuine talent.

I eventually returned to Fin, who needed someone to take a commercial from start to finish. I remember this one clearly: Fin had taken on more work than they had desks for, with freelancers scattered throughout the building, and I turned up to work on a job of my own with nowhere to sit. I ended up sharing Stuart's on-set laptop and a corner of a desk in another room.

I got the job done, and Stuart offered me a full-time position again. I accepted — I was ready to be done with freelancing.

My second stint at Fin was excellent; it felt as though I'd never left. I was producing high-quality work with Sydney's top directors, alongside a strong team. My time at Collider had given me a new confidence to take on things that would once have made me nervous. I should also mention my good friend Leif Petersen, a fellow 3D Artist at Fin — together we produced some of my favourite work from that period.

I also began building tools of my own — a frame-buffer render management system that functioned much like Maya Render Layers before Maya had render layers. That tool likely saved the company a significant number of man-hours and rendering hours.

That habit of tinkering opened new doors. A job came in requiring a stadium full of crowds, and at the time, large-scale crowd simulation was notoriously difficult unless you used software like Massive — the same technology used for the battle scenes in The Lord of the Rings. Stuart put it simply: "You're learning Massive. The deadline's tight — are you up for it?" Four weeks to learn new software, integrate it into our pipeline, and deliver more than twenty shots. We took it on.

That was one of the last commercials I worked on at Fin. I was about to get married, and my fiancée and I were planning to move to London to claim British citizenship through ancestry.

Armed with a new showreel, we left for London.

To set the scene: in January 2008, the Hollywood writers' strike had just wrapped, triggering cancellations of movies and TV shows across the industry. By the time my wife and I arrived in London, the major post-production houses — Framestore, Double Negative, and others — had let go of the majority of their staff. It was one of the worst possible times to be job-hunting in the industry, and there was genuine uncertainty about where things were headed.

Fortunately, my old friend Matt Estela had co-founded a small VFX company called The House of Curves. They were looking for freelance help on a couple of commercials, and given the state of the market, I took the opportunity.

I worked on some interesting projects and got hands-on with RealFlow across a few commercials. It was a small, scrappy shop, but everything worked — no complex pipeline overhead, just straightforward visual effects.

My wife and I were enjoying London, and I was content to wait out the industry downturn. But only four or five months in, I was headhunted by The Mill to join their Los Angeles studio, which had opened a year earlier.

Around the same time, Pixar had reached out, and I was in the running for a Visual Effects Technical Director role — though it didn't go to plan by the third interview. Speaking directly with the lead technical directors on WALL-E, they asked about my experience with RealFlow. I mentioned I'd just spent months working with it and wasn't its biggest fan — probably not the answer they were hoping for.

I wasn't too disappointed, though — I'd just accepted a role at the number-one post-production company in the world, as a Visual Effects Supervisor and Massive Technical Director. Having spent part of my childhood in L.A., it also felt like the right move personally.

During my time at The Mill, I was fortunate to work on iconic commercials alongside Hollywood directors and actors, surrounded by a genuinely talented team who cared about their craft. My lead, John Leonti, was an excellent mentor. When we last caught up, we reminisced about the early days, when the studio was a team of about twenty, compared to the 300-plus it is today.

After a few years, I felt I'd reached a real peak technically — capable of handling almost anything — but I also began to feel disconnected, in a way I found difficult to explain at the time. I'm a fairly logical person by nature: inputs, decisions, outputs. So this feeling was somewhat foreign to me. It wasn't tied to a specific project or a bad experience — I still enjoyed the work. It was more a general sense that built gradually over time, a quiet feeling that something was missing.

Looking back, I think what I was craving was creative ownership. There was plenty of creativity in the work itself, but many of the decisions that shaped it sat outside my control.

When I did decide to leave, it came together quickly. My boss at the time was caught somewhat off guard — we still keep in touch to this day, and we both look back on that period as something of a golden age for The Mill's Los Angeles studio. Both my boss and the managing director were supportive, and generously told me the door would remain open if things didn't work out.

A friend from Sydney was visiting the U.S. for work and showed me a very early version of Unity, explaining how easy it made prototyping. We started tinkering with some ideas with no real intention of them going anywhere — but over the course of about a month, we ended up releasing a game called Qbism on the Apple App Store.

Qbism did surprisingly well, and it was enough proof-of-concept to convince us we could do this full-time. We agreed to give it a year. I handed in my resignation at The Mill and moved back to Sydney. Before I left, John told me my job would always be there if things didn't work out. I haven't taken him up on that offer yet.

Co-founding Blowfish Studios as a two-person indie game studio, by the end of our first year we'd released a hit game called Siegecraft on the App Store.

The next decade is hard to compress into a handful of highlights — there was simply too much happening, too many small wins stacked on top of each other, to point to any single "this was the moment" scene. If I'm honest, it was less a series of cinematic turning points and more a long string of milestones that only look significant in hindsight:

• Finally moving out of my business partner's apartment and into a real office.
• Hiring our first employee.
• Shipping our first game on Xbox, then PlayStation, then Switch.
• Being recognised in public, once, by someone who'd played one of our games.
• Relocating to North Sydney as the team grew from under twenty people to more than thirty.
• Being acquired.

At our peak, we had around eighty people internally, and closer to 150 when you counted subcontractors. Over the decade we shipped more than thirty games across multiple platforms, kept several titles alive with ongoing updates, and maintained a public game for Scholastic USA continuously for over ten years. One title, Phantom Galaxies, carried real weight behind it — and had the broader crypto market moved the way many expected at the time, it might have become something much bigger again.

By the time Covid hit, the studio had grown to more than thirty people. Covid brought real financial pressure — several clients cut budgets, and we had to delay a number of projects. At the same time, we were seeking funding for a large Unreal Engine title.

It became clear that investor appetite was drying up, and that acquisition was the direction the industry was heading. We explored the idea and began talking to a handful of companies.

Of everyone we spoke with, Animoca Brands stood out — they approached things differently, and were genuinely happy to let us remain the studio we wanted to be, making the games we wanted to make. It wasn't long before we accepted their offer and began pivoting the studio toward Web3, joining the Animoca family.

None of this would have been possible without the exceptional people around me — a team that helped me build a world-class department of concept artists, 3D artists, audio designers, and UX/UI designers.

After the acquisition was announced and the internal transition began, things felt genuinely positive for that first year or so. Over time, though, I began noticing small cracks: decisions being made that I didn't always agree with, but had little influence over. As the years went on, I found my say in the direction of the broader business gradually diminishing.

Over time, I recognised that the right path forward was to step back. For the final year or so, I deliberately handed off responsibilities to others on my team and shifted into more of an advisory role. When the opportunity for redundancy eventually came up, I took it, and was glad to.

People sometimes ask if I feel disappointed or sad about how it ended. Honestly, I don't. The company I built, and later sold, became something different to what it once was — and that's simply the nature of these things. If anything, I feel grateful for the experience and ready to move on to what's next.

It's still fresh, so I won't go into much more detail on this chapter just yet. But looking back on the acquisition as a whole, it was an eye-opening experience — as a company we reached new heights, grew as both a business and a brand, launched the largest AAA blockchain game to date, and sold $20M in virtual land.

With a successful exit behind me — the next chapter starts below.