I'm a storyteller I love narrative I love narratives that fuel stories and move them
along and we see the experience of life through them
When I was a child I went to ballet school, followed my sister to ballet school when I
was seven and loved it so much that I decided that I wanted to be a dancer and so I went
to London to school to study dance and realised quite quickly that dance was not really for
me, I wanted to be a choreographer, I didn't fancy being a dancer who had to do everything
that other people said so I became a choreographer and I had a career as a choreographer until
I was in my late thirties. I was also directing in the theatre, I worked around the world
and occasionally I designed productions as well. I began to draw and to paint which is
not something I'd ever done. I'd drawn but I'd never painted. Things started to evolve
for me and I had a second career which I'm still in which is as an artist.
We are talking about the built environment, we are talking about the historic environment,
we're talking about heritage and that's something I do know about because ever since I was a
child I've wondered around castles and imagined what they would be like and wondered around
great houses and imagined what it might have been like to live in them. I love taking all
those things from different places and putting them all in a box and keeping them close to
me and then taking them out when I need them so when I come to do a job like this job that
I'm doing now for English Heritage I've got all these toys in the box and I know exactly
where to go to rootle them out and what would be perfect for the brief and to make it work
and that's a treat.
When we got the brief through from English Heritage we were really really excited. One
of the things that we were struck by was that it was a really interesting technology challenge
which is something that we love doing. One of the things that we were most drawn to and
I know that I was really excited about was heraldic illustration and being able to incorporate
things like dragons and mythical being which is not something that we typically get to
do so that was hugely exciting, that was a really nice approach.
When we saw the brief for this project obviously we were really excited. With illustration
as well, often you see online maps everyone's used to using Google it's flat it's graphic
it's really easy to use obviously but this was less about a map as a thing to navigate
but more as an exploration piece, a piece of artwork.
I think because it's quite an illustration rich website and we've got so many assets
of images and layers and things that we've put into it that's quite unusual, a lot of
the time now design is taking a more flat image-less kind of route so it's interesting
to actually put all of that into the app in such a scale that we have done it and for
it to work really quickly and be performant on mobile and tablets and anything that you
throw at it really.
You have a mini map that shows you where you are in relation to the rest of the UK and
we were trying to think about how you could as you drag around the map you could move
the focus spots on the mini map. You want it to be a seamless experience. We want it
to be easy we want them to get the fully immersive experience of being able to drag around the
UK and find all these myths and legends.
Obviously we want to preserve as much of Clive's style as possible. When Clive is illustrating
the map it's a huge canvas and it looks incredible it looks amazing and that's normally how people
view a map is they open it out unfold it uncover lots of things all at once and then they can
hone in on a certain area, little forest critters or sea creatures looming round the coastline
dragging ships down, yeah, it just started to get really exciting.
This is my painting room, this is my easel currently covered not in paintings but in
drawings for telling tales.
We're up to artex world now, this horrible rough plaster which is due to come off but
we haven't got around to it but it's my secret weapon. When you use it to make rubbings you
get these lovely textures that are quite three-dimensional, and so the textures of the map were made from
rubbing pencils over paper on top of my artex walls in my studio.
Old maps are full of these sea monsters. Here's one of my references which is this fantastic
book on sea monsters on medieval and renaissance maps and that's been really useful to look
at and so although I'm working in my own style I'm using historic references. One of the
things that will happen on the map, the first thing that we see is what we're calling a
cartouche. What you'll have is this light shape over a dark background and there will
be writing in the middle of it and then the digital eye goes through this and descends
through clouds and onto the map. English Heritage presenting a map about myths and legends.
So we have references to buildings in care and we've used George and the Dragon as the
crowning glory of this particular cartouche because George is one of the characters that
we'll be investigating and they just add a little sweetness to the feel of going into
an environment that we're going to be drawn into because it's a living, breathing environment.
I think one of the things about animation, one of the things about puppetry is that you
need to get the feeling that the characters are breathing, that there's life going on.
Stillness is kind of death, movement is life and so just having a little bit of animation
will be quite charming and will lead us through and then as we go through little flights of
birds go past as we go down, descend through the clouds and then all of a sudden here we
are, we see the map.