About me
That’s me on the left, shivering at the base of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland, and it shows me in my element – happily trotting around parts of the world (usually Europe as it’s my favourite part) seeing, well, cool stuff. I’m happiest in the Arctic and other cold regions, but am known to tentatively dip a toe into warmer climes from time to time. Rugged, sprawling mountains, boreal forests, dramatic fjords and tranquil lakes are my destinations of choice. I may have been born in Africa, but I’ve always been a Viking at heart, so while my friends scurry down to the southern hemisphere during the winter, you’ll find me enduring -40°C temperatures, huddled over a tripod somewhere inside the Arctic circle, photographing the aurora borealis or catastrophically injuring myself attempting to husky sled down the side of a mountain.
My love of travelling is an ideal companion for my interest in photography. A hobby I’ve only picked up in the last year or so, it’s quickly become a passion, and it’s something I’m increasingly spending my spare time on. Not to mention draining my bank account. I currently shoot with a Canon EOS 5D Mark III and a Fujifilm FinePix x100, and keep galleries of some of my shots on Flickr and 500px.
Other interests and passions include music, playing drums, banjo and guitar and tinkering on the mandolin, ancient history (especially of the Middle East and Mediterranean), painting, drawing, sociology, archaeology, science (especially astrophysics), internet memes, twitter-stalking Professor Brian Cox, European cinema, collecting hideous tourist trinkets, grammar, playing XBox, linguistics, accumulating a vast collection of hats, and mythology of all flavours. One day I am going to do a degree in ancient history so that I can realise my dream of being a pretentious and stuffy academic, complete with a musty office in the basement of a museum.
I fund my various interests and travels by working as a digital artist in the film visual effects industry. Although I come from a generalist background from my years of working in commercials and documentaries, I always had a strong preference for working with textures, and as such, I have specialised in texture painting since around 2006. My career has taken me around the world, from my native country of South Africa, to the United States, and finally to the United Kingdom, where I am happily settled. I currently work as a senior texture painter at Framestore in London. Over the years, I’ve contributed to and written a number of books about 3D graphics and texture painting, as well as numerous articles for publications such as 3D World Magazine, Keyframe Magazine, and others. Due to my work schedule, I generally don’t take on any freelance work.
I’m currently working on Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, which is due for release later this year.
If you need to contact me for some reason, please note that I can take up to several weeks to respond to non-urgent emails. If you’re contacting me with a CG-related question, you may want to consider posting it over at the CGTalk web forums. It’s not that I don’t want to help you, but you’re likely to get a faster response there.
You can download my full detailed PDF resumé here (includes contact details).
View my profile on Linkedin here.
View my imdb.com listing here.