5. Give a brief overview of your workflow. Where do you start and how do you get to the final product?

The beginning of my work on graphic narratives almost always starts with music. Song is one of the most powerful forms of emotion for me and a specific song that can move me into a concept is the point of inception. I craft worlds using a specific soundtrack for each. Clint Mansell is always on repeat with lots of Murcof, Autechre, Richard Skelton, or anything else I can get my hands on. Story is built on the back of music and serves as the framing architecture for the experience. There’s a lot of time spent purely researching about the world I want to craft. For my most recent work, I’ve spent a lot of time learning about Jules Verne; the way he worked, lived—really, his worldview on life. From that point, the buildout process is tedious. Because I don’t do much photography myself, images I use are rigorous photocomposites that require a lot of nurturing and doctoring to get the desired effect. It’s not unlikely for me to composite 6 or 7 different terrains on one canvas. All of these are styled in texture, composition, lighting and perspective. Once a piece is at a place I can move on to the next one, I’ll leave it in that current state until I get further into the narrative and typically wind up opening that file again to change something that progresses the narrative in context with the story more effectively. A large part of the design process for myself is also infusing organic materials into my pieces. Microbial structures, fibers and space are just a few of the elements I use to create a sense of universal familiarity.

6. Where do you see yourself in the future?

I’m working on a new narrative right now called Aeturnus. It’s an ode of sorts to Jules Verne as a man who existed in a time outside of time. A dreamer who created worlds of fiction that traversed land, air, space, and sea long before some of that was even practically possible. He’s credited as the father of science fiction and as such, I owe him a lot of inspiration. The future will, hopefully, be filled with passionately pursuing narrative design—pushing each series to be the best it can possibly be and creating stories that stay with the user. I’d love to work in a more multidisciplinary environment in future works. There’s a lot that the audience can’t fully experience from just the images in the story. My time is currently split with work on my graphic narratives and with Quantic Fox developing new media for the mobile and touch platforms. I’d consider it a great honor to continue working in both fields.