When I was seven years old, Auntie Ada sat me down with a large box of superhero comics and left me alone for hours ensuring that I would be a fan of fantastic stories for the rest of my life. By the time I was eleven I was gorging on Michael Moorcock, Phillip Jose Farmer, Isaac Asimov and Frank Herbert to name a few. In the years that followed I was obsessed with Stephen King, James Herbert and later again, Clive Barker. For over five decades I tried writing my own stories countless times and never finished a single one.

A couple of years ago I started to teach myself how to use Blender 3D animation software which led to experiments in green screen music videos and then to making a short video based on one of my unfinished stories called "The Knucker Hole" where I met and teamed up with Carl Anderson, who would play the central character, Steve Stephenson. You can find this video on my personal Youtube channel. It's an amateurish but fun story with clunky vfx. I'm very fond of it. In fact, although Steve Stephenson met a grisly end, I couldn't stop thinking of other adventures for him. I bounced these ideas off Carl and suddenly it developed into making an audio drama for him. To my surprise, I sat down every day for three months writing the script and finished four episodes with not a single moment of procrastination. Unheard of! I now realise that novel writing, particularly scene description, is not one of my strengths. In fact I find writing them incredibly dull, whereas, I could blast through dialogue without much effort. Perhaps stupidly, I did make things challenging for myself by deciding to also make a companion motion comic. This was a mammoth task but I am pleased I did it.

So, I now find myself with a plan. Studio Phantom is the home for all my future stories.

David Cripps, June 2021