Bricklayer, creative director, AI filmmaker.

"Boy, you'll never be anything in life if you skip university."

I was seventeen when my design technology teacher said that to me. I'd just told him I was leaving school to lay bricks with my dad, and that the plan was to save up for a workstation and teach myself design at night. He didn't love the plan.

Labouring was brutal and I loved it. Five a.m. starts, icy Welsh mornings, hands too cold to grip the shovel, and my dad racing me to the middle of a trench for who buys lunch. He always won. I'd get home around five, eat, and freelance until the early hours for clients who mostly weren't paying yet.

My first paid job was a logo and a website for a man who'd invented a wall-mounted clothes airer. I quoted him £200 and promised it by Friday. I had never built a website. I learned Dreamweaver across seventy two hours without sleep and delivered it on time. Saying yes first and working out the how by Friday has served me pretty well since, and it's a big part of how I ended up making films with AI.

Twenty years of other people's brands, and a few of my own

I founded my studio, TH3M, in 2016 and ran it for ten years. We made The Royal Mint's largest ever creative campaign, five fully modelled miniature worlds checked detail by detail with the Imperial War Museum and Wedgwood, and it returned 1,100%. There was work for Bentley, Sony, Under Armour, Nike, Coinbase and J.K. Rowling along the way, and in Web3 I was VeChain's first European creative partner and in the room for the AntShares to NEO rebrand.

Closer to home, I helped grow Watches of Wales from the back of a local antiques shop into the UK's fastest-growing pre-owned luxury watch business, with a flagship store in Cardiff, its name at Cardiff Airport and a Cardiff Blues sponsorship. An industry-first finance integration I led tripled sales in its first year.

I've been on the founder side too. One of those companies was a crypto exchange called Pineapple, and the pineapple, it turns out, is a symbol commonly associated with swinging. The exchange did swaps, so the name fitted. Instead of renaming it I leaned all the way in with characters, lore and launch films. It reached a $23M market cap on no funding, and I exited in 2025. Galactic Fight League, the one before it, was acquired by Vulcan Forged and SkyBridge Capital.

Then the tools caught up

Years ago my dad told me about something he saw at a bus stop on his way to work. A teenager, an old soldier and not much said between them. He described it in about four sentences and it clearly never left him. I promised I'd make it one day.

Priority Seat is that film. It took 731 images and 163 video generations to get 3 minutes 46 I'd put my name on, and it has won four festival awards, including Best Director and Best Super Short Film at the Cannes World Film Festival. My dad has seen it. That was the point.

What ties all of it together is story. The clothes airer, the coins, the exchange and the film only worked because somebody felt something first and understood it second. AI hasn't changed that. It's made the list of stories I can afford to tell a lot longer.

I've usually been early. I built websites before anyone taught me how, got into crypto in 2016 and worked inside it before most agencies could spell it, and I was making films with generative AI while most of the industry was still arguing about whether they counted. I work AI-first now and I'm not tied to any one platform. I use whichever has the best model for the shot that week, drive as much of it as I can from Claude over MCP, and build my own tools when nothing else will do. Twenty years of doing this is what decides which takes make the cut.

The best work I've made in twenty years has happened in the last twelve months. There's a new model most weeks and I'd rather have used it than read about it, which is why every Friday I invent a brand that doesn't exist and make its advert by the evening.

I went back to my old school a while ago to thank that teacher. What he gave me wasn't an insult. It was fuel.

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