Freelancing is an exercise in controlled chaos. You learn to build the parachute while you’re falling, improvise, adapt, and make something out of whatever’s in front of you. That’s been my reality for the past 10 years, balancing art direction, design, photography, videography, production, post-production, set-building, and whatever else needs doing—not in neat compartments, but as a constantly shifting, overlapping, multidisciplinary practice. One that exists somewhere between precision and instinct, strategy and improvisation, control and absolute surrender.
Freelancing isn’t a straight line. It’s a collision course—dead ends, unexpected breakthroughs, blind faith. It’s saying yes before you know how, figuring it out on the way, and making something unexpected out of the chaos.
It started in Oldham, where I learned the value of resourcefulness—making things work when there’s not much to work with. Where telling my career advisor I wanted to be a sculptor got me a work placement stocking t-shirts at NEXT.
So I left and sculpted my own world instead.
Days spent tearing through charity shops, and nights building installations in my bedroom. My car boot was always on standby, crammed with candelabras, antique frames, and whatever else looked like it belonged in some surreal, half-forgotten dreamscape. Ready to go.
Not much has changed.
I moved to study Fine Art, got obsessed with colour, composition, mood—convinced there was a blueprint to follow, and a clear line through. Then I spent a year in San Diego and realised there wasn’t. Just instinct, embracing chaos, and making it work.
That year, I learned video on battered old DV cameras, taught by burners who spoke in riddles and rewired the way I saw the world. On my first day, my tutor told me to forget everything I’d ever been taught—that I was too focused on making images instead of letting them happen, that I needed to stop trying to frame the world and start actually seeing it. Another swore that the best shots come when you give up on getting them.
It was like being thrown into film school run by visionaries who’d seen more truth in the desert than most people do in a lifetime—wild, unpredictable, but somehow, it all made perfect sense.
Video for me became less about documentation and more about distortion—about pushing visuals to the edge of recognition, about layering meaning until it collapses in on itself. That’s a thread that’s run through everything I’ve done since.
THE INDUSTRY: THE HIGHS, THE LOWS & THE COMPLETE MADNESS
There’s nothing else like this job—but it’s not for the faint of heart. One minute you’re pulling off the impossible with a team of 20+, building entire worlds from scratch, and the next, you’re wondering if you should just pack it in and go and live in the woods. Some days, everything clicks—the light hits right, the set falls into place, the shot breathes on its own. Other days, you’re rewiring a lamp with five minutes to go, spray-painting a prop on the fly, and making that £10 budget stretch like it’s £10K.
People see the final piece and assume it just exists, like it appeared fully formed, without the panic, the last-minute problem-solving, the quiet breakdowns in the corner of a warehouse at 3 AM, and the powerhouse team of rag-tag creatives that made it happen.
Sometimes I feel like I’m playing a Manchester-wide game of Supermarket Sweep, tearing through DIY shops, prop houses, and car boot sales, trying to find the exact right thing before call time. Or worse—ringing that guy I met once in The Castle who swore he could get me “anything”, only to realise I don’t actually know what he does or if this ‘anything’ includes what I need. But somehow, against all logic, it always comes together.
Some of my best days have started with a text along the lines of “Let’s make Moss Side look like Miami.” like it’s just a matter of popping down to B&Q for some neon and palm trees. No follow-up, no logistics—just the blind confidence that somewhere, somehow, I’ll find a way to make it happen.
Because that’s how it goes. One day it’s “Do you know anyone with a hearse?”, the next it’s “How fast can you get your hands on a carousel?” or “Reckon it would be OK to fill a swimming pool with jelly?”.
No job ever starts with normal questions. It’s never “Do we have time for this?”—it’s “Which back-alley antique dealer owes you a favour?” or “Who do we know that owns a horse?”
And somehow, the answer is always yes. The thing will be found, borrowed, built, or—if all else fails—faked so convincingly that no one questions it. Because that’s the job. Making things happen, even when logic suggests otherwise.
Like the time I got locked in the back room of a taxi rank, buried under a mountain of discarded office chairs, speed-dialling my mate to tell them this was it, this was how I’d go—that I’d finally met the Facebook Marketplace deal that would be my end. No way out, no sign of the seller, just me and a fortress of second-hand furniture. I’d almost accepted my fate when I spotted a roller shutter half-open, revealing an incredibly nice man who, without any sense of urgency, simply asked if I wanted four office chairs for £20. Of course I did. And they were perfect.
From my young days innocently making an eyeball shrine in my mum’s kitchen for a music promo, SO over-the-top that the elderly neighbours started rumours that we were witches. Or the one that still haunts me—how do you meticulously itemise every single thing in a colour-drenched corner shop, shoot in it for hours, and then return every Mars bar, Dime bar, and rogue packet of chewing gum back to the exact place it came from, after a 14 hour day? Every multipack of crisps exactly as it was before we disrupted the entire ecosystem of the shop like some kind of high-concept heist team—except instead of stealing, we were just temporarily making it cinematic.
Some of the best things I’ve worked on have come from things going completely wrong—because when you take away the comfort of control, you start making decisions on instinct, and sometimes that’s when the real magic happens.
Of course, there are the not-so-fun bits too. The budget that disappears into thin air before you’ve even started. The clients who want Hollywood on a B&M budget. The feedback loop that slowly warps a simple idea into something completely unrecognisable ("We love it! But can it be more fresh, but also more vintage? And dark. But uplifting?").
The long hours, the uncertainty, the feast-or-famine cycles, the existential dread of waiting for invoices to be paid—it’s all part of the deal. And yet, somehow, when it works, when you see the final shot, when it all comes together despite the chaos, there’s nothing else like it.
MY CREATIVE PRACTICE - FRAGMENTATIONS OF A SIMULATED REALITY
Somewhere between memory and invention, between what’s real and what’s reconstructed, is where my work lives.
I’ve been fixated on the idea that memory—both personal and cinematic—is inherently unstable. That what we remember is already mediated, filtered through film, nostalgia, fantasy.
We live in a world where experience is refracted through screens, where memories are half-lived, half-replayed, where hyperreality overrides the real thing. I lean into that—using analogue video synthesis, dreamlike color palettes, digital manipulation—to create spaces that feel like they exist just beyond the frame of recognition. Like you’ve seen them before, but you can’t place where.
Nothing is fixed. Images loop, fracture, collide. Some shots are slowed down so much they barely move. Others distort beyond recognition. Because clarity isn’t the goal. The goal is a feeling, a rhythm, a mood. A reminder that memory itself is a construction, built from fragments of things that may or may not have happened the way we remember them.
WHY STUBBORNNESS MATTERS
For the past two years, I’ve been running my company The Afternoon, a creative studio in Manchester that exists in that weird space between art, film, design, and storytelling. We pull off the impossible on tight timelines, ridiculous budgets, and sometimes no sleep—building entire visual landscapes from scratch, making things look effortless when, behind the scenes, someone is probably running across set holding a prop that’s still drying.
The truth is, the industry doesn’t get any easier. You don’t suddenly crack the code and start coasting. But you do learn how to trust the process, the chaos, the people around you. You learn that the best work doesn’t come from playing it safe—it comes from pushing things too far, from being just a little bit reckless, from knowing when to control and when to let go.
Say yes before you're ready. You’ll figure it out.
Keep your work weird. You don’t have to make things palatable.
Don’t wait for permission. If no one’s giving you opportunities, make your own.
Trust the obsession. If you can’t stop thinking about it, it’s probably worth doing.
There’s no blueprint for this job. You make it up, figure it out, and somehow, it works.
Would I trade it for something easier? Not a chance.
Well… maybe when I’m thirteen emails deep chasing an overdue invoice, questioning all my life choices. But even then—probably not.
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