Profile
O graduated from Loughborough University with a First-Class Honours in Fine Art (2019) and a distinction from his master’s degree in Graphic Design & Visualisation (2020). Currently, O helps look after students as a Sub-Warden and teaches throughout a mixture of activities as a Postgraduate University Teacher in the Graphic Design Undergraduate & Postgraduate Taught courses. Most recently, he has gained the SFHEA Qualification and become a certified Mental Health First Aider, firmly setting his sights on completing his PhD.
Areas of expertise
Animation, Storytelling, Illustration, Graphic Design.
Negotiating British Blackness: Using animation to critically analyse Black Teenage Males' experiences of the identity formation process is the title of O's ongoing PhD research. Using auto-ethnographic and collaborative methodologies to explore approaches of representing Black British masculinities in animated storytelling, the work experiments with design workflows that could be applied to other groups of people as a means of targeted campaigns or film-making for entertainment. Involving character, prop, location and narrative design using a mixture of participant prompts (interviews, storyboarding, and collage exercises), the research contributes to demonstrations of how 2D animation can represent it's subjects uniquely against other mediums. The research's goal is diversify narratives in fiction and non-fiction contexts of animation and demonstrate how choices in off-screen representation can enrich the storytelling process and lead to authentic outcomes with greater resonance with the people they represent and their audience too.