For Gareth Edwards’ science-fiction film The Creator, I worked on the fictional anime sequences that appear on television screens watched by Alphie, the young AI character at the centre of the film.

Rather than functioning simply as background entertainment, these short animated moments were conceived as a piece of media that exists inside the world of the film. The imagery subtly anticipates ideas and events within the larger story, creating a layer of visual foreshadowing without directly explaining what is going to happen.

The creative direction was rooted in the language of Japanese animation from the 1980s and early 1990s. Working from early concepts and storyboard development, we explored a visual vocabulary influenced by classic science-fiction anime — bold compositions, graphic silhouettes, hand-painted environments and highly designed spacecraft. References such as Gundam and Evangelion helped inform the visual language while the finished sequences still needed to feel like an authentic piece of fictional media belonging specifically to the world of The Creator.

My main responsibility was the visual development and production of the environments and backgrounds. I designed and painted the settings in Photoshop, illustrated a number of the spacecraft and helped establish the painterly anime aesthetic that would carry through the sequences. The artwork also had to be created with animation in mind: compositions, layers and spatial separation needed to support the movement that would later be introduced into the shots.

I additionally worked in After Effects on compositing and the integration of the finished visual elements. This meant moving between illustration and motion rather than treating the backgrounds as isolated paintings. The goal was to preserve the handmade quality of the artwork while giving the shots enough depth and movement to convincingly function as animated television footage inside the live-action film.

The work was developed in close creative dialogue with Gareth Edwards and evolved from early visual ideas through storyboard and design exploration into the final sequences seen in the film. For me, the project became a particularly interesting intersection between environment design, anime-inspired illustration, cinematic storytelling and compositing.