Tag / side quests

Over the past twenty years I’ve been out and about in Folkestone, photographing and collecting references from the local environment. My interest has always been in how texture, colour, and atmosphere carry through time — the look and feel of the town in from the interiors and structures established around the mid-century onwards that still…

I recently put together a small interim showcase at 14 Tontine Street (B&B Project Space, Folkestone) during the Folkestone triennial period. It featured a custom-built arcade-style games cabinet, a nod to the old Rotunda machines, with a screen running early material from the Side Quest/Utopia project. I also showed a selection of the Hooden Horses…

In terms of technical setup, the project is being developed using Unreal Engine alongside the Blackmagic Ultimatte 12 keyer and DeckLink card to enable live compositing. My initial experiments have focused on creating MVPs (minimum viable products) to test the pipeline and establish functionality, using the Hooden Horses and simple virtual environment backgrounds as source…

Alongside the motion experiments, I’ve been developing the props and characters that will feed into the project. A lot of this is about drawing on Kentish traditions – the kind of carnivalesque humour, crude play, and chaotic energy that comes through in things like the old joke shops and the way local carnivals often leaned…

Research and project Development Inspiration and reflection on provincial regional customs, intangible Heratage and hauntolgical virtual environments. I’ve always admired Staffordshire Flatback figurines. From the misinterpreted depictions of exotic beasts—shaped by Stoke pottery workers who often lacked social mobility and formal education—to the reworked pottery castings, brightly painted in loose, garish brushstrokes to reflect the…