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About

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Jim studied Foundation at the West Surrey College of Art and Design in Farnham (now UCA Farnham) in 1992 and went on to take a BA Hons in Animation at Edinburgh College of Art, leaving in 1997.

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He was lucky enough to receive a BAFTA New Talent Award for Best Director and the British Animation Award for Best Debut Director for his student film The Little Princess' Birthday Party, a charming stop motion comedy narrative.

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He spent a few years at Tandem Films in Cross Street, Islington mostly getting in the way but also learning a lot from Gordon Allen, Nigel Pay and Daniel Greaves amongst others.

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He went to the National Film and Television School's Animation Course in 1999 but left halfway through to create a series of Promax Award winning films with Ed Talfan for BBC Wales, 'Henry's Heroes' for the 6 Nations Rugby, under the now defunct Squint Films.

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At some point (I think it was in Sweden) he bumped into Chris O'Reilly, co-founder of Nexus Productions, and after a conversation on the phone and a chance brief landing on their desk hooked up with them to make his first national TV advert for BBC talent 2000.

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Over the last seventeen/eighteen years he made a lot of adverts, comedy sketches, titles sequences, some documentary animation, a fair amount of spinning things and an entirely unique way of playing computer games (an iteration of which was in the Science Museum up until the end of 2017).

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One of the most important things he created during that time was the Phonotrope® which is a type of 3D/2D contemporary zoetrope. In 2017 he won a legal battle with the IPO to register the name (that he actually made up) as a trademark.

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He has also been incredibly fortunate to have helped an amazing group of people (Lou, Karl and Bruce) create a rather unique company called Abundance Investment of which he is massively proud of being a part of.

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Sixteen years and a rather lot of adventures later he finally left Nexus in 2016 and is currently teaching at UCA Farnham helping the awesomeness of Lesley Adams and Stuart Hilton, amongst others, drag the students kicking and screaming into the world of shining film-making talent.
 

He is properly developing the Phonotrope® brand with the help of Mr Talfan again as well as running the home for his daughter and wife and continues to proudly make things for Abundnace.

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As of July 2019 he gained a PGCert in Higher Education (for Creative Education) through the UCA University, run by the incomparable Tony Reeves and his right hand person Nicholas Houghton. He met some absolutely wonderful people including Ben Smart, Fran Sheldon, Orande Mensink, Lizzie Ransom and Maddy Jones.

 

In September 2019 he was asked to help out on the MA in Animation at the UCA Farnham and is very very excited about it. He has had some really quite cool ideas (in part thanks to the PGCert from Tony).

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In 2023 he was one of the three judges for the London International Animation Festival with Joseph Wallace and Jennifer Zheng where he had the honour of being part of the decision to award Flóra Anna Buda's 27 the Film of the Festival and Best Sound design to Marta Magnuska's Misaligned and Best British Film to Ross Stringer's Crab Day amongst others.

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He currently acts as an animation consultant on a number of projects including animated feature films and TV series amongst others and, unrelated to that, is passionate about databases (really).

email

Threads (using a bit)

Vimeo (using)

Insta (always forget to check)

LinkedIn (still don't use to its fullest extent)

Bluesky (using a tiny bit)

Twitter (avoiding but checking in occasionally)

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