At the start of 2011 I was still working for Sarner UK on a variety of interesting projects. I pitched for and won the HMS Belfast "Turret Experience" for the Imperial War Museum. This was a fascinating project as I not only got to delve into the archives at the Imperial War Museum but also to interview some of the few surviving sailors about their epic experiences manning the gun turrets during battle in order to get the script as historically accurate as possible.

I also did extensive work for the Fram Museum referbishment in Norway, including the design of the "Explorers Club" area, and work on presentations to secure funding and permissions for the new Gjøa museum to be built alongside the existing Fram building. I'm delighted that this was successful and the building work has started.

I designed a children's outdoor play area (with Mammoths!) for the Glacier Museum in Fjærland, Norway, two Dark Rides for Russia and created assorted concepts for the "Dr Who Experience" at Olympia during the early design stages. Read a review in the Guardian

The Dark Rides were tremendous fun to work on and for one of them I rendered out a whole movie from the 3D model I had built, edited it together and Sarner had a soundtrack made for it. This gave a wonderfully immersive demonstration of how the ride would work. One of the other briliant aspects of this job is finding new toys and the Zone EU interactive laser tag system was perfect for one of these rides allowing my little animatronic robot enemies to "die" realistically (and on budget) when shot by some spectacular toy guns.

Since leaving Sarner last summer, I've been working back in TV on old favourites like "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" and new shows such as "Hit the Road" with Jack Whitehall, "Show Me the Funny" (finale at the Hammersmith Apollo), "The Exit List" and "The Voice" an epic new talent singing show from America currently being filmed at the BBC with some amazingly complex sets. See a trailer here...

In February I branched out into teaching a couple of short courses at South Hill Park Art Centre in Bracknell. The first was an introduction to Unity Game Engine and the second was teaching the use of SketchUp to create and export models for 3D printing.

My young Unity students pitched in with a vengeance and some of their very impressive first games are being posted online. These prototypes were built in a few hours from scratch during the course. Details here.

3D printing is hugely exciting for Set Designers as now you can model a prop or prototype on your computer, email it off and a few days later your models come back in the post in real living 3D! A variety of people, from programmers to artists, attended the course and created some beautiful things with no previous knowledge of SketchUp at all. More info here and a video about the workshop at South Hill Park Arts Centre and the future of 3D printing here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2g1mSKgJgo

Martin Franklin, who organises the Digital Media Centre at South Hill Park Arts Centre got me onto his Gene Pool Radio broadcast to talk about new technology: http://www.digitalmediacentre.org/wp/?p=2340

3D printed 1:10 scale model of an animatronic Prop

Blast from the very distant past; I've been asked to contribute an interview by 1:25 magazine for Scenographers in Denmark about my time as Design Associate for Phantom of the Opera.

It was an amazing experience and one of the most technically challenging. I'm delighted to have the opportunity to demonstrate ultimate geekdom about some of my favourite tricky technical bits on my first solo "Phantom" in the smallest theatre in which it was ever performed.