Less Thinkering More Tinkering

A neon-soaked passion-filled presentation of all things creativity, trying to strike the elusive balance between uncurbed enthusiasm and pragmatic process.

Director & Designer Gavin Strange plots his creative journey through his time in the design and film industry– picking it apart and extracting the lessons and learnings from it all. It’s loud, silly, and hopefully energising. The aim of the game is to convince YOU to make more of the stuff that makes YOUR heart sing.

Transcription

[Applause]

[Music]

GAVIN STRANGE:

So, I’m very excited to be here tonight.

It’s a pleasure, as always, doing anything connected with the incredible, beautiful chef’s kiss human that is Marc Thiele and his wonderful crew.

So, big loves to all of them.

So, thank you for having me here.

I’m very excited to have this slot to hopefully wake you up.

You’ve had a lovely day.

Just saying to Jason, just what a lovely mix of speakers talking about all sorts of different things with very different types of work and approaches to work, but a lovely sort of collective feeling of just making stuff and doing stuff and seeing what happens.

So, I’m very much in the same vein as that.

So, let me introduce myself, explain who the hell I am and why I’m here.

My name is Gavin Strange.

Hello, my pronouns are he, him, and I go by the name Jamfactory on the internet.

I live and work in beautiful, beautiful Bristol in England.

I’ve lived there for over 20 years now, and I love Bristol for many different things, but I originally moved there for its awesome music, bands like Portishead and Massive Attack and Ronnie Size and Idols and lots of awesome people.

It’s got an amazing art, street art, graffiti scene.

Banksy is originally from there, but there’s a whole plethora of amazing artists that call Bristol their home.

And it’s also home to just awesome people, like people who will tear down a full metal statue of a horrible slave owner and chuck it in the river.

Yes, Bristol.

Yes, Bristol.

That’s the sort of awesome city it is.

I love that place.

So I live in beautiful Bristol with my wonderful wife, Jane, who is a fellow creative.

She’s a jewellery designer and maker, and we live in that beautiful place with our two young children, Sullivan Gray Strange and Sylvie Blue Strange.

And what I love about kids is they are a brilliant excuse to make stuff, to create stuff.

In the year 2025 of our Lord, the universe does not want us to create.

Everything is terrible all the time.

It’s overwhelming in every single way.

So to stay creative, to stay motivated, to keep that sort of candle burning for wanting to make stuff, it’s really, really hard.

So you have to look to anywhere to look for that inspiration.

So if I can find it in any ways, and my kids are one of those ways.

I just love making stuff for them for absolutely no reason at all.

My daughter does not need her own black metal logo, but she has one.

She absolutely does not need her own black metal logo in the form of a holographic die-cut sticker that I had hundreds made of and gave to absolutely no one, but she has them.

I’m in this arms race with absolutely no one to make the best kid’s birthday party invite.

The other parents don’t play along.

They don’t care, but I care.

It’s lovely.

I spent ages going to a cheap toy shop in Bristol and then taking all the blister packs off of these die-cut Hot Wheels cars and then using glue to glue them back on.

And I gave them all out to the kids.

Did they care?

Of course they’re not.

They’re eight-year-olds.

They ripped them apart and just chucked the design stuff in the bin.

But it was a reason to create.

It was a reason to do.

It made me laugh.

I was spending my evenings doing this, taking ages, taking that bloody plastic off and just gluing it back, knowing that no one else would care.

But I care.

It’s funny.

It’s silly.

It made me chuckle.

But don’t let me show you that, of course, having children is wonderful, and it’s just joyous all the time.

There’s no problems.

I’ve found that since having children, I make this noise.

I make this involuntary noise quite a lot, and it sort of sounds like, fuck’s sake, all the time, all the time.

I’m not quite sure what it means.

It’s sort of a foreign language, but I seem to say it under my voice all the time.

And I’ve said this to other people, and they’re like, I make that noise too.

And it’s often when I have children.

So it’s not always joyous, but I feel like there’s a solidarity in people just muttering, fuck’s sake, under their breath.

My children are lovely.

I love them.

I also do a lot of stuff which is for the kids, but really, I mean for the kids.

Like Pinplo, which is my Nintendo Switch-powered Duplo brick-framed virtual pinball machine.

When I started out doing this, it was like, oh, the kids will love it.

It’s for the kids.

That’s in my workshop, then.

I don’t go in there.

This is my space.

But again, it began as, oh, wouldn’t it be funny, and just ended up in a thing.

And I just, I enjoyed the process, and making a little silly graphic, and sort of even just filming videos.

I know it’s just my children in my space, but just doing a bit of graphic design, doing a bit of illustration, filming some stuff, editing some things together, just using different tools, and just any and all excuses to be creative and to make stuff.

You know, any reason whatsoever, whatsoever.

We also share our home with our lovely adopted rescue greyhound, Peggy, who’s this beautiful old beast, and she’s been with us for a decade now.

But don’t let this beautiful mid-air, in-flight, gorgeous example of dog architecture.

I’ve just, anatomy.

I totally forgot the word for anatomy.

Dog architecture.

That’s an amazing band name.

But this is not what she always looks like.

This is what she looks like 99.9% of the time.

Anyway, anyway, that’s who I am.

Why the hell am I here talking to you?

Let’s explain that a little bit, shall we?

So, I’ve got a day job.

And I work for a studio called Aardman.

Aardman, woo!

Yes, some people who know who Aardman is.

So Aardman is a creative studio.

It’s also based in Bristol.

It’s nearly 50 years old now.

And it’s predominantly known for stop frame animation.

It’s the home of Wallace and Gromit, of Shaun the Sheep, of Chicken Run, amongst many, many, many other things.

And I’ve been there for 17 years now.

And I’ll talk a bit more about my story later on in the talk.

But the reason I love being there is I feel like I’m at home.

I feel like I’m at home because they just want to make joyous things and silly things.

And they want to entertain and delight and just give people a lovely feeling.

And again, in the current hell, timeline, nightmare scenario, we’re all in.

I need that.

I need that more than ever.

And I’m so proud to be in a place that really values that as well.

They want to be silly.

They want to be joyous.

And so I joined here originally as a graphic designer, as a senior digital designer.

And I’ll share more of this as well.

I basically would shout to anyone that would listen that I had big dreams of being a filmmaker and wanted to make moving image as well.

But I love it there.

It’s a really, really special place.

And what is really lovely is character.

It really concerns itself with character, with funny looking individuals.

And just to know that I work here with those characters and with those people that created them is really, really special.

And I think that is a huge element of it for me.

It’s these humans and the people that make the craft, particularly in the stock frame animation.

So much of these things are made by hand, whether they are engineering very small metal work to make the armature rigs, which sit inside the puppets, or they’re painting miniature leaves inside Gromit’s garden.

You know, there’s a trillion different uses and skills on display, even just in this small studio in Bristol.

And that’s kind of proudly Bristol as well.

There’s a couple of sites in Bristol.

It’s not in London, not in the capital.

Look, Bristol is in the southwest of England.

And it just adds to this joyousness of a place that just values human craft and tactility and all that love stuff.

So I’m just so stoked and excited to be in the gravitational pull of these people, particularly because originally I come from the world of digital design.

And so all of my work was pixels, but I just desperately wanted to also work in the world of plasticine as well.

And so I feel incredibly grateful that I could then join this place and slowly over a period of a decade, weave my way into other parts of the company.

So the stuff I do there can be really, really varied.

Sometimes it’s passion projects that I get to bring into the studio.

So this was another title sequence, actually, for the Off Festival in Barcelona made in 2016.

Originally started as a passion project.

Hector, who was the director of the festival, asked if I would do it with Aardman.

But I can’t just commit all of Aardman to a new project.

I had to bring it in and discuss it with everyone that owns a company.

But what we ended up doing was I ended up co-directing it with a wonderful, amazing man called Merlin Crossingham, which A is the greatest name that you’ll ever hear.

Two, A, A and two, Jesus Christ, what’s happened to my brain?

You lot have all had free beers as well, so I don’t think you care.

You can say whatever I like.

And what’s my point?

Merlin.

Merlin’s an amazing name.

That’s my point.

But working together and just sort of making this thing and making this amorphous thing as well, we ended up calling it a stop frame live action rap video motion graphics title sequence because it was all the things that we wanted it to be.

We just got to exercise our excitement in making things and doing things, but doing it within the studio space of Aardman.

So we got to borrow equipment, and we got to borrow a little bit of people’s time, and all of that good stuff.

We got to make amazing things.

Then sometimes it’s on a much smaller scale.

BBC2 rebranded a few years ago back in the UK, and they have this lovely iDent system where in between each program a sort of beautiful visual graphic thing would come from the very edges of the screen, completely mask the whole screen.

And then when that lovely thing pulled away, the next program or trailer was on display.

So they really needed this system that would fill frame and then exit frame.

They had these lovely, gorgeous, beautiful CG, floaty, wonderful, just gorgeous renders from really brilliant studios also in the UK.

And then they came to Aardman, and we gave them some slime and some eyes.

And those eyes are magnetically puppeteered by our brilliant model maker who is literally just moving them.

And we figured we can’t control slime, so that’s never going to really work to our advantage, but we can control time.

So we shot it using 1,000 frames a second Phantom cameras, and literally just had rigs and shoved it along.

I mean, it was an absolute nightmare, and nothing worked, and it very nearly ended my career.

This was the second official directing gig I had, and it went terribly.

I was like, oh, that was a good run too.

But in the end, thanks to a brilliant production team, we managed to pull through and just made something weird and wonky, and again, tactile and goofy and silly and just hopefully charming and fun.

And just the development of this, being in a studio with these people for a couple of weeks, mucking around with slime.

We bought, we literally, every sort of craft shop in Bristol, we bought all of their slime.

There was none left.

We ran Bristol out of slime.

And this was that time sort of when all kids wanted to play with slime.

So it was a premium.

It was an absolute premium, and we’d stolen it all.

And then there’s, on the opposite scale, there’s much bigger, beautiful, ambitious projects like this film.

It’s a film called Turtle Journey, which was a commission by Greenpeace that I was super, super proud to have directed.

And actually, because we’ve got the time, because it’s evening, I’m going to show you this.

It’s only 100 seconds long, and then I can give you a little bit of context about it.

Let’s have a look.

It started out like any other trip home.

At first, it seemed just like the usual frustrations.

It’s a video, Mum.

Oops, sorry.

How much longer?

Don’t worry, we’ll be home in no time.

I spy with my little eye, something beginning with...

What?

Um, wow!

So close.

All right, that’s it.

I’m taking the scenic route.

Oh, no, not a dad detour.

You do know the way, don’t you, lovely?

But that’s when things got a bit... odd.

It’s probably just roadworks.

Come here, Mum.

Oh!

And that was just...

And connect with other people.

I’m always sending emails to, like, potential collaborators or brands or whatever, and I often don’t hear back.

And that’s fine.

You know, they don’t need to see you crying behind your computer screens.

That’s a private moment for me, and that’s absolutely fine.

But it is low risk.

You know, I don’t have to sort of...

Yeah, they don’t have to see those tears.

I can be a big boy and just move on if things don’t work out.

So just, I love having this space to make stuff and do stuff and try stuff.

And it can take you in a really interesting place as well.

I ended up writing a book about this stuff, which was never, never the plan.

My English teacher would absolutely attest to this was never, ever the plan, but sort of fell into giving talks and fell into enjoying being able to be privileged enough to share what I do and kind of how I got here and all of that different stuff.

And then just an opportunity to write, something came about, so I just wanted to throw my all into it.

You know, if you just sort of see anything that’s out there and just get excited, just jump on it.

And sometimes, and actually most times, stuff just dies.

It’s just dead in the water and it doesn’t go anywhere else.

But, you know, you’ll learn something about yourself.

You might learn a new skill or you might just make a new friendship in even if the thing didn’t fulfill itself and it wasn’t successful.

There’s no harm in trying.

There’s no harm in just putting yourself out there.

Ended up on flipping British children’s TV for five series at one point in my life, doing very important, very dignified acting work, I’ll have you know.

And actually, the more I share this slide, I think I’m a very good actor who has a great range of playing the absolute moronic idiot on a children’s TV show.

But this was never the plan.

This was never the goal.

It was just ended up, this is my actual real friend, Ricky, and we’re his real mates.

And we were together on an art show.

But there was a lovely, sort of unexpected consequence with this that I got to observe the director of the series and how he hopperated.

Hopperated?

Operated.

What’s happening to my voice tonight?

Hopperated.

He operated in such a lovely way.

He was really calm and considerate and he really connected with people, especially because we all, I don’t know if you can tell, we’re not real actors, guys.

I don’t know if this is abundantly clear in what I’m saying.

So we’re all a bunch of just actually regular idiots and he had to create a TV show out of it.

But he was still so kind and compassionate and patient with us.

So, you know, I learned loads from that.

And I love just observing any scene that was playing out that I didn’t have to be in.

It was lovely just watching and listening and seeing how he communicated with the team members.

And I credit that so much with sort of learning to how to direct myself because just being, again, being in that gravitational pull, that was never the plan.

That was never the goal.

It was just any opportunity that’s out there.

If you can latch onto it and see where it can take you, why not go for it?

And I realised that I’ve really been sort of stuck in this, not stuck, actually enjoying this loop for the last 20 plus years, nearly 25 years now of basically having a day job or having something that occupies most of my time and then doing all the other stuff that no one wants me to do in my own time, whatever that may look like.

And those hours have changed drastically since being a young 20-something and having all the time in the world to now being a 42-year-old human with two children is different, but it’s just as exciting.

It’s just as joyous.

I mean, I’m just a bit more sleepy, but talking to Marc about being able to help and do some graphics and titles for this place, again, any and all excuse to make things happen is really important.

And I think if you can, trying to carve out your own space and trying to make something, whatever it is, whatever space you’ve got access to, I mean, hello.

I mean, I personally feel like this is a work of art, really.

I mean, blue painted flames on the walls, this guy.

The silver micro PC, do you remember that trend?

Let’s build PCs really small so they’re just thermally throttled all the time.

A modem.

I mean, this cable management genuinely makes me feel physically sick.

And I’m only really showing you this so I can work through my trauma of managing.

I don’t know what was I thinking.

But just having a space that’s your own, anything that you can.

This was my parents’ house when I was like 18 or 19 or something like that.

But I’ve always tried to squeeze into whatever I can to just make a space your own.

Again, it’s incredibly hard to make stuff and to do stuff and to create.

There’s so many barriers in place and it can feel overwhelming and you desperately want to make stuff, but you might have the energy, but not the time.

And you might have the time, but not the energy.

If those two things can combine, then it’s absolute magic.

But then sometimes you might have the time and the energy, but the space isn’t there to do it.

You don’t want to do it on the kitchen table because you need to concentrate or whatever it is.

So in whatever form you can, you’ve got to try and sort of engineer scenarios to work out for you.

And so if that means having a space, then do it.

I feel like this is my final Pokemon evolution stage.

This is where I work at the minute.

I love it.

You cannot colour grade anything.

Everything is neon pink and I love it.

It’s a choice.

Just before I came on stage, I was like, Marc, can we make the lights pink, please?

Yes, we can.

Thank you.

God bless you, tech and AV team.

Thank you very much.

I just love pink.

It’s the best colour.

You can have hot pink, neon pink, magenta pink, coral pink, pastel pink.

It’s just a shade for everything.

Why would you not love it?

But I just like, you know, this is a minimalist, absolute nightmare.

But for me, it works.

I want to have visual input in my eyeballs all the time at any given moment, because that’s, I think I’m just learning to listen to kind of who I am and how am I going to be the best creative.

If I don’t create and make stuff, then I generally don’t know who I am.

So, and again, with it being so difficult and so fraught all the time, you know, there’s so much tension in our whole lives with everything, massive geopolitical, global stuff, but also just within ourselves as well.

Again, having the energy, being inspired enough.

There’s this constant battle.

So again, anything you can do to break down those barriers.

And so for me, it is having everything I’ve ever loved in one space and painting it neon pink.

That works for me.

What works for you?

How are you going to go forward?

What are you going to take away?

And I think there’s also actually sharing everything that you make, and obviously the brilliant speakers we’ve had today are here, and we’re all so lucky to be speakers to share what we do, but it’s a huge important part of, if you make something, do share it with the world.

Do show it off.

And I think there’s a big distinction to be made that you don’t, by showing off your work, it’s not all about being an extrovert.

It’s very easy for me to stand up here with neon pink slides and moving around and keep talking really fast.

This works for me because this is who I am as a creative, but you can be an introverted person, still shout about your work.

You can just shout it quietly.

There are different ways to work.

And I think something that I think really sticks in my head is like Nick Park, for example, the creator of Wallace & Gromit and one of the directors of Aardman is very introverted.

He’s very shy.

He’s very thoughtful, but he’s made some of the most iconic, beautiful, loved characters in the world because he’s found his way to express his voice.

And often his voice is actually through a silent dog, you know, that’s animated, but he’s found his way.

And there’s other brilliant directors and animators and creatives at Aardman.

And there’s a brilliant director called Magda Osinska who did this beautiful Star Wars short a few years ago.

She’s a brilliant director, but she won’t be standing here shouting about.

She does things in a much different way.

So I think that’s a really important distinction.

You don’t, it’s not all about being an extrovert.

It’s about, you know, there’s a difference between confidence and arrogance.

And you can share what you do and show what you do and tell the world.

And, you know, you can be in your own brain worrying about it.

Well, I just feel like I’m talking about myself all the time.

No, if it’s creative and it’s what you’ve made, amazing, people do want to see it.

Don’t forget that.

And I think I’ve just tried to find ways for me to have platforms to show what I do.

So this is my website now, but I’ve just always had an online space, just redesigning it all the time when you could just make websites just totally illegible and not make any sense.

But that was a big, big part of it.

Just I would redesign it every other week, but it’s all about having work out there, having, you know, the universe knows what I do.

And, you know, no one looks at it, that’s fine.

My mum looks at my website every now and then, but I feel happy feeling like I am represented.

I am saying this is me, this is my work.

This is what I can do.

And it’s lovely if then someone wants you to do that thing for them, amazing.

But also it’s just a really nice feeling for sort of archive purposes, really, of this is me as a human, and this is what I’ve created in 2025, and this is it.

There’s something very nice about being able to serve that up.

So do it, make work, share work, show stuff, keep making it over and over and over again.

Right, right, right, right.

I kind of want to talk about a specific project because it were really special.

It were really nice.

So this project is called Wallace and Gromit, shot on iPhone.

And it was Wallace and Gromit, shot on iPhone, commissioned by Apple, projected 101 meters tall onto Battersea Power Station in London every single night of December 2024.

Every single part of that sentence is mind-blowing to me, like brain leaking out of my ears.

And the fact that that was all together in one project was just absolutely nuts.

So it really was, it was a Wallace and Gromit short animation shot entirely on iPhone 16 Pro Maxes, commissioned by Apple because Battersea Power Station is their UK headquarters.

It’s a stunning building.

Inside, it’s absolutely amazing.

And the year before us, David Hockney had done some Christmas trees on an iPad, and then they wanted to up the game this year with some animation.

So they came to Aardman.

I luckily won the pitch to direct it.

And honestly, it was everything I’ve just sort of said about Aardman, about being in the gravitational pull of these people and being around them was just like magnified times a million because it was on a crazy time scale because Christmas doesn’t often move.

It’s on a quite set day.

They don’t, it’s not that flexible.

We tried, we asked, Santa said no, we had to stick to it.

So it was this like sort of all systems go approach to it.

But again, it was like that energy and their enthusiasm was really, really lovely.

It was so grand in scale in every single way that it was almost so massive that you don’t stress about it at all.

You just, what’s the next task?

What’s the next task?

And for me personally, it was the first time I was directing Wallace O’Gromit.

I’ve worked on Wallace O’Gromit since I joined Aardman.

But for me to direct it myself was really, really special and not to be taken lightly, but I got to do it.

And actually then I sort of credit my friendship with Nick Parker, Merlin Crossingham, who I’ve mentioned now multiple times because I’ve sort of fallen in with them and got to work with them over the years.

And so, because we’re friends now, that relationship to be able to take the crown jewels, which is Wallace O’Gromit and to work with them was really special.

So it felt like the perfect project that was a sort of encapsulation of everything that I’ve really been talking about, collaboration and being excited and passionate and listening and being in the gravitational pull of people.

And yeah, and it truly was entirely shot on iPhones.

The way we shoot stop frame animation is sort of simple in one way and incredibly technical in another.

Essentially stop frame animation is taking a photograph, moving something, taking another photograph, move that thing again or move something else, up to you, take another photograph and you work linearly through it.

But because if you’re shooting things on green screen, you need to shoot multiple takes and multiple plates.

And so the technicality gets quite complicated.

And then you might decide to project onto two cylindrical towers, which are 101 metres tall, which is not...

I don’t know if you know, but 101 metres tall cylinder is very different to a 16 by 9 television.

They’re two very different shapes, very, very different.

So to try and frame them, we had to build this brilliant rig.

So up here, top left is a motion control head.

So every time an animator would get the puppet pose and they would take a frame, this motorised head was programmed to tilt up a very, very, very, very, very specific degree to capture the second frame.

So we would capture the puppets and the Christmas trees in two different frames for each frame, so we could then stitch them together for the projection to make sure the resolution was big enough.

Because the res, the deliverable we had to make was a 6,000 pixels by 6,000 pixels thing that was projected.

So it was this wonderful art meets science and math and tech together, and all these very smart people who would make it.

But we captured the whole film on iPhone, but then I’d shot all of my live action videos, which are reference videos for the animators on performance, shot all that on iPhone as well.

But then just, I love, I love behind the scenes.

I love watching behind the scenes.

I feel like the director series DVDs in the 2000s, if you remember those, were basically my film school.

DVD extras were my film school.

So I love any chance to shoot and capture my friends and the people that I get to work with, but then get to edit it as well.

So I shot all of that on the iPhone as well.

And so we, even the animators in the animators units, they had extra reference cameras, so they could sort of see the puppet that they were animating.

So Lee here is animating Gromit, but then he wanted to see the entire tree as well.

So then we had another camera that was the iPhone capturing another feed.

So we got really tech really, really quickly.

But again, just the excitement and the energy in the room and those people wanting to make stuff.

And all, you know, we all know the date again, Christmas doesn’t move.

We all know the date that we are working together.

You know, so much of, particularly if you’re working on film, you will make it and then it doesn’t see the light of day for a few months, sometimes a few years.

But we knew we would deliver this and then we’d go to London and then we see it for real.

So that was always really, really exciting.

And then just for me, like I love, I’ve got an Apple Vision Pro, the spatial computer, and I super love it.

It just, it’s, again, for someone who loves visual input and everything around me all the time, it’s like, I can have more screens, more pixels beamed directly into my eyeballs.

I love it.

I got to shoot spatial 3D video as well.

So I captured loads of behind the scenes of the crew working on it.

And then getting to share that with people as spatial video as well was just, no, again, no one asked me to do that.

But I was just excited to do it.

I wanted to, I wanted to see it.

I wanted to capture it.

And it was just lovely, man.

Just, again, just trying to then sort of bring my Jam Factory personal stuff into it.

So I would try and capture portraits of everyone that worked on the film again.

And it was a lovely brief, shoot it all on iPhone, shoot it raw, and then do grading and stuff.

And just, again, no one’s asking for it, no one wants it, but it was really lovely to be able to do it.

But then these found their way, you know, these were used in promotional and PR.

And then we had this lovely launch inside Batsy Power Station as well, that they were then all framed on the wall, and they looked lovely.

And, you know, again, you never know.

That wasn’t the plan that would shoot them, and then they find their way into somewhere.

It was just, I want them to exist.

I want to do it.

I want to learn.

I want to grow.

I want to, you know, if you do something that makes you happy and excited creatively, you never know where it’s going to take you.

But then it is very exciting then working with a client as big as Apple, because they do things like, yes, we will charter a helicopter to capture it on the launch night.

That’s amazing.

I’m here, just, hang on, right in front, sort of standing here, my brain is sort of melting out of my head, going, oh my God, oh my God, Wallace & Gromit, Batsy Power Station.

And it was just lovely.

It was really lovely, and it just sort of continued, just this beautiful payoff of working on Wallace & Gromit with Apple to make these things, and just bonkers things sort of continue to happen.

Ended up meeting the King of England on a Thursday.

That was the thing that happened.

That’s a whole talk in and of itself.

I got to see my stupid face really big on Regent Street, just walking through London.

But what went the most to me actually was being with Nick, was spending real proper time with Nick.

So this was on the same day that His Majesty the King came there.

After that, me and Nick had a cup of tea and a toasty, and then we went outside to look at the projection together, and just being with him, being in the gravitational pull of him.

And he’s filming this to show his friends back home, and then he keeps turning around going, oh, you should be so proud, Gav.

Hey, I’m Nick, yes, thank you.

And it honestly, honestly means so much.

My brain was just, after that day as well, it was just so much, but it does mean so much, because I think as well, thinking about him, Nick as a creative human, he created Wallace and Gormit for his student film when he was at university.

These were two characters that existed in his brain, and he wanted them to be out in the world, and so he made a film about them.

And they are now these endearing sort of legacy characters that have so much love and affection, and that is from one man’s creativity.

That was just something that he felt passionate about that he put out into the world, and then has grown these wonderful films, and a brilliant brand, it’s a huge brand, and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people work with Nick to bring that vision to life.

But he’s still a lovely, kind, compassionate, genius human who wants to create and put out into the world.

That can be any one of us, that is us.

We all have that ambition and that power to make stuff and create stuff, and so much time you will spend in your own brain going, oh, but I can’t today, or I’ve got no time, or you will tell yourself a trillion reasons why you can’t do something, but you can and you should, and you never, never know where things are going to go.

Right, let’s do another gear shift, shall we?

Bear with me, Dusseldorf.

Here we go. let’s go So I make really wonky music.

Oh, hello.

Hello.

I’ve literally never pressed that button in my life.

There we go.

There we go.

I make really wonky music.

I’m a wonky person.

I make wonky music, and I’m really proud of it.

Am I proud of it?

I don’t know.

I have mixed feelings about it.

I love that I make it.

I love that it makes me excited.

I love music and production, and just crafting something is a totally different head space.

But let me very quickly explain how it ... what is happening now?

I didn’t even know this button changes slides in OBS.

Every day’s a school day.

Let’s learn.

That was because I was clicking the wrong thing, wasn’t it?

There we go.

It started with this.

I saw this thing on the internet.

This is the Ableton Posh 2.

It’s a hardware controller that talks to Ableton, the music production software, and is basically you don’t have to use a keyboard or mouse if you don’t want to.

You can buy this, and you can make music.

You can create.

You can do whatever you like.

I didn’t really know what that was when I saw it, but look at it.

It’s got glowy buttons, and it’s big, and it’s physical, and it’s tactile.

I think it was a YouTube auto-serve thing that threw me it, and it just instantly grabbed my attention.

Like a lot of us, I’m sure, keyboard and mice, fine.

They’ve not really changed that much in 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years.

Yes, we’ve all got clacky, clacky mechanical keyboards.

Is it a cherry switch?

Is it a brown switch?

That’s about as much as we’ve focused, hyper-focused on what switch should it be, but still there’s not that much difference between keyboard and mouse.

I like the fact that joke got about three laughs from people who have mechanical keyboards, so shout out my mechanical keyboard people.

The rest of you are like, I just need a beer.

Can you shut the fuck up about mechanical keyboards?

Don’t worry.

Not long left.

Hold on.

What was I talking about?

This thing.

I saw it, and it was amazing, and I didn’t know what it is, and I bought it, and my wife was like, oh, that’s nice.

What is it?

I don’t know.

Let’s see.

How much was it?

500 pounds?

What?

No, no.

I’ll learn to use it.

I’ll use it in my work.

It’s a tax write-off.

I’d better start using it.

I’d better start learning, but what a reason to just make and create and do.

Instantly, it was, using a keyboard and mouse for so long got kind of boring, but that input mechanism is different.

It’s tactile.

I think I love what Brendan was showing and sharing earlier, like he’s particularly building physical things, creating new things, creating new devices.

It was so exciting.

So when I saw something like this pop up, amazing, and then I realized, oh, no, I’m that guy.

I’ve got all the gear and no idea, but actually, I don’t think that’s fair, actually.

I think when you’re new to something, you’ve got all the gear and you’re full of ideas, but absolutely nothing is clear.

You don’t even know what to Google.

You don’t know how to do anything.

You’re just sort of instantly stuck.

You get over that honeymoon period of just knob twiddling and button pressing.

I’m using music production as an example, but that new thing you get into, like cameras are a cameras are another thing, you’re like, yeah, look at all the dials, look at all the things, and then you kind of get stuck and you don’t know how to progress beyond it, but actually, you do have ideas, it’s just there’s that barrier that you absolutely have to push through, and so I tried to sort of lean into stuff that I did know, and actually, I realized that constraints are my friend, that actually, back then, I kind of wanted to make this wonky music, but I felt it important to share and show, really just for a sense of completion for myself, not expecting anyone to listen to it, but I wanted to sort of go through that process and get to the end so I could start something new, but back then, if you could do video, it could only be square and it could only be 60 seconds, okay, that’s way more achievable.

I can’t make a three and a half, four minute musical track that has ebbs and flows and choruses and pre-choruses and a bridge and all of that stuff, and I still can’t, but a 60 second beat, that is achievable, maybe I could give that a go, so I kind of did, because I felt like the energy and that rush to keep going, so I’m going to give myself a musical name, I’m getting serious now, so I gave it the name of Project Toy, and I created a branding system, for who, who is branding it, it’s me, on my own, in my little stupid pink shed, I’m not going to give this as a style guide to anyone, but again, if I’m sort of tricking myself into making more of it, you’re just constantly in this silly battle with yourself to get over your own insecurities and get over your other part of your brain telling you not to do it, don’t do it, you’re rubbish, you’re never going to get any better, I’m trying to silence that with graphic design, and just make stuff happen, I made merch, why not, it’s for no one, my sibling has one, my mum has one, my dad has one, a lovely bloke called Dave in Sussex bought one on the internet, God bless you Dave, but who is it for, doesn’t really matter, I wanted it to exist, but what happened was it kind of made me go forwards, I would try and make more music, and because I’ve made more music, I’d need to make more visualisers, and then I’d get excited on the visualisers, so I’d need to make more music, but I then started jumping more into 3D, so I started to open up Cinema 4D, and then I started to get into Blender more, because Blender’s free, and Blender’s awesome, but just trying to learn and grow, but actually then what I realised is that design system I’d created was actually perfect, because I only now use, whenever I’m making any graphics or visualisers, I only ever use a circle, or a sphere, a triangle, and a capsule, and what that does is it instantly takes out that massive inevitability of, oh, you can make anything, so if you can make anything, where do you even begin?

No, I’ve got three shapes, I’ve got three shapes, and that’s good, let’s get cracking, so actually trying to have those constraints that I know really, really helped me, I started trying to bring character more into it, I started to try and bring my old mini character work into my music production stuff, I ended up doing the good old graphic design thing of making album covers, they’re not album covers, they’re just SoundCloud thumbnails, but I tricked myself and I was excited and I felt like a big grown-up designer, finally getting to design record sleeves, but again that system is in place, I’m only using triangle, capsule, circle, it makes it achievable, but then because I’ve kind of limited what it could be, I then can experiment with techniques, so sometimes it’s pure vector stuff, other times it’s 3D stuff, other times it’s combinations of all these things, and then, okay, well if I’m starting to create a design system, well maybe the type can always be the same, I can always move it around, but I’ll keep the same typefaces, the same executions, and again it keeps it achievable, it keeps it real, it keeps the momentum going, that’s what I’m trying to say, just trying to get that, taking that first step is so difficult in anything that we do, isn’t it?

So if you can just sort of have that cadence and have that rhythm already there, because you know, great, I don’t need to reinvent the wheel, I’m going to use those shapes and I’ll move forward, I found it really, really freeing, and then I realised I just started buying more stuff, but as the collection started growing, actually I did get a bit more confident, and I just realised that no-one cares, in the best way, no-one gives a monkey’s, no-one cares what we do, really, individually, and so you do, you get so obsessed that people will laugh and think you’re rubbish and you’re not out there, but people are too busy just trying to pay their flipping bills, man, like they’re too worried that the sun is halfway through its life cycle and one day the sun, roughly four to five billion years in the future, will eventually just reach the end of its life and in its beautiful death throes it will engulf us and grow to a vast size that dwarfs everything we’ve ever known and incinerate absolutely everything we’ve ever done, so really everything is futile, so why are you scrolling Instagram?

Why?

Why?

Stop it!

The sun’s dying, guys!

If there’s anything you take away from tonight, it’s the eventual heat death of the universe, but the sun will die sooner than that, so just stop scrolling, just stop scrolling, but just making stuff and just realising that people don’t care, they are too worried, they might not be worried about the death of the sun, but they are concerned about their own things, they don’t care whether you’re, you know, so just free yourself, free your mind of all that stuff, and I just started buying bits and making bits and honestly no-one watches this stuff, no-one listens to it, I know the irony of sharing this, particularly on Instagram when everyone’s on mute, no-one listens to it, but it doesn’t really matter, like I feel proud that I’ve made it, I feel proud that I feel like I’ve learnt the software a little bit better, I feel like I’ve kind of moved on a bit more, I know things a little more, so if anything though, you know, it’s really useful to then bring it back into my day jobs, if I’m briefing a sound designer or an audio artist or a composer, at least I’ve got a little bit of the language, a little bit of the understanding to be sympathetic, to understand like, oh actually, sorry, we started off at this tempo and actually could we go to that tempo or could we change, you know, it’s helpful in a small way, it might not be a massive way, but just being able to communicate better with other people that you work with, that’s never a downside at all, and really it’s about being productive and not precious, I think particularly in your own stuff, obviously this doesn’t apply to what you excel at in your day job and everything has to be perfect and precise of course, but in your own time actually just make stuff and be scrappy and be quick and be nimble and sort of prototype and throw things out and see where it can go, and I fell down this rabbit hole of knowing that the OPZ, this device here, can talk to Unity and send MIDI signals and those MIDI signals can be interpreted as commands inside Unity and do different things, and you know, I’m very rudimentary and basic in this stuff, but it was enough to be exciting for me and just, I like real-time reactive sort of things that are happening now, this is why I like putting the audio waveforms on the bottom of my presentations and having ticker tapes and stuff, there’s something very special about us together as humans right now, I like highlighting that, so having this world where you can just sort of make things and try things and make it real and sort of see where it can go but on the limits and the edges of your knowledge is really good when you send Marc Thiele a message going, hey, yeah, you know those titles I’m going to do?

How about I play them live?

What I love here is, Marc, you’ve never asked whether I can do that, whether I’ve done it before, or whether it’s possible, you’re a wonderful, kind, trusting human, I don’t know where you are but God bless you, thank you very much, and so it’s lovely, you know, that stuff here is all really fed into the title sequence because it’s the same device, it’s sending signals and interpreting them into a different way, so just a tiny little sidebar as to how the titles are made, so this is the BT title machine, you’ll see that Lego features quite a lot in my work, I’m so shit at woodwork or metalwork, I can’t build you anything, I’m such an utter disappointment to my father, I really am, but I’m pretty good at Lego, and I’ve got access to a lot of Lego because I’ve two children and I love Lego, so building a surround which meant that I could frame the OPZ and then have a spot top right to mount the GoPro camera was really an important part of the functioning design, but I’ve really enjoyed leaning into that as well, it makes me feel like a kid again, of being scrappy and just building stuff and I like the aesthetic as well, I’m just constantly trying to pursue those earlier moments in childhood where you’re not worried about the state of the world and you’re just making and creating, again, I think being around the kids and seeing their utter unabashed just make stuff, do stuff, they don’t care about the aesthetics, they just want it to exist in the world, I need to do more of that, and that thing came from this, because this is the Teenage Engineering, so Brendan is right, I’m a very big fan of Teenage Engineering, and they prototyped this device called the KO2 and they used Lego for their prototyping to get it to its accurate size and then they just kept the same form factor, so you can just stick Lego on the top of it and just raid your children’s small little drawers and just put all the little bits on there and add a little camera to it, so again, it makes me feel joy and it’s silly and I happily spend a whole evening very carefully, precisely selecting the little pieces of Lego to put on my little music device that I can’t play very well, but I don’t care, I don’t care, I’m having fun while doing it, anyway, I could talk about that all the time, but yeah, the titles, to bring it back to that tiny, tiny bit were basically my love letter to 2000s era, graphic design, web design, digital design, I love when nothing was legible, everything was illegible, nothing made sense, everything was experimental and weird, everything was laid over the top of each other, you know, Designers Republic, David Carson, K10K, Designers Kinky, all of that sort of era of graphic design, this was the mood board I sent to Marc, can I just fill it with stuff and graphics and data and bits and bobs and things and just fill it with stuff, so again, full props to Marc for letting that happen, but you know, this is all sort of spiralled out of the music stuff really and then bringing it back to the stuff that I enjoyed and I’m still massively inspired by in my childhood, you know, just making just nonsense monograms for each speaker so each logo is connected to each wonderful speaker and just, I wouldn’t give myself the time to create 12 unique monograms had this passion project not come along and so, again, any and all excuses to make stuff and do stuff and just lean into it, just do it, you know, just giving every speaker a lovely colour and then putting all their graphics and so I would trawl every speaker’s websites and social media and just, again, because that 2000s era design was just like, just loads of stuff everywhere, just visual overload.

I could populate that visual overload with stuff for the speaker, so it’s just been a lovely experiment, just doing that stuff, just making it, building it, and then splitting all those designs up that were all created in Illustrator and then porting them into Unity and then taking all of the Unity data and then making, so each musical track from the titles I made all on the OPZ and then that’s all fed through into Unity and then out of it captured by OBS, that’s how we did the titles.

But my favourite bit, actually, I’ve only got a few minutes left, don’t worry, I’m on the end, was recording my friends and dear family for the names of each speakers and whenever I come to an event, I love making a wonky bit of music and then sampling the name of the city or the speaker’s name.

These are some of my favourites.

[Samples of the speaker names, spoken by various people]

There’s a few favourites there, that Paula, that’s my son saying Paula, sorry.

This, this next one is my favourite, I’m a bit biased because it’s my daughter.

[Samples of the speaker names, spoken by various people]

But trying to get your children to do something that you want them to do is incredibly difficult, especially trying to record them in a nice quiet environment, I just sacked that off and just recorded them on my iPhone and just went for it.

And just doing that was silly, and it was a lovely evening’s work, just chopping it all up, getting all these samples, you know, you lovely speakers have never met all those people, and you might not ever meet them, but just any and all excuses to make stuff happen.

And it’s, you know, through all this process, it’s just taken me to new places, and I like trying to do these silly little performances in the middle of talks now for no other reason than it makes me grow and be a better, be a better human.

But this is really exciting about really where the future of Project Toy could go.

It’s like farting.

It is like farting, yes.

Really astute, beautiful words there.

Right, let’s finish this, shall we?

Don’t wait to be asked, please.

Do it because no one asks you to.

Don’t wait for the universe to give you that job, that role, that opportunity, just do it because you want to see it exist.

Seek creative satisfaction wherever you can get it.

It is no one’s responsibility to make sure you are creatively satisfied.

It is not your employer’s, it is not your family, your workplace, it is no one else’s responsibility.

It’s totally up to you.

I didn’t get this for so long, I thought Aardman would give me everything, but it’s not their responsibility.

I need to seek that, find that, so making stuff, doing stuff, to top up that energy at whatever levels is really, really crucially important.

Don’t think about stuff, just less tinkering, more tinkering.

Make stuff, break stuff, delete stuff.

Make an absolute mess, but just keep tinkering, keep playing, keep drawing and doodling, just seeing where you can go.

Be scrappy, be rogue, be productive and not precious.

Just don’t be so precious about those little bits, those experiments.

Those things can grow, they can develop, they can evolve, but they’ve got to exist in the first place.

They have to be out there.

They have to be in the world.

Don’t make it perfect, make it now.

This is the best piece of advice anyone ever gave to me.

A brilliant executive at Aardman said it.

I have no idea where the quote is originally from, but it sticks with me all the time, particularly in stuff that’s your own workspace.

But please, just remember when you as one single human, as one person, how do we as individuals ever stand out?

When there’s so many incredible people on the planet who do, there’s billions of people and a lot of them do what we want to do.

How do you stand out?

How do you make that splash?

How do you be known?

Just remember, just remember that even the smallest of spoons can make the biggest of waves.

Dankeschön.