J. J. Guest - After Effects animator, illustrator and web designer

I am an animator and motion graphic designer with fifteen years experience in the industry. I have designed the main titles for three feature films and worked on hundreds of television commercials, TV idents and short films. My main area of expertise is with Adobe After Effects, and I am an accomplished user of the entire Adobe Creative Suite. I am currently teaching myself Cinema 4D.

My personal style can best be seen in my series of experimental films. Under the umbrella title 'B.Y.O. Pics', these films draw on my interest in collage and art movements such as FLUXUS, Neo-Dadaism and the Situationists.

I am also an accomplished web designer and developer with two years' online retail experience. In my spare time I write interactive fiction games and am a member of the incipient improvisation comedy troupe 'SuperCouth'.

Storage 24 - with titles by J. J. Guest

Hiding Heidi, a children's book by author and illustrator Fiona Woodcock, will be published on July 14th 2016. To promote the book we have made a forty second trailer from Fiona's original illustrations.

Character animation was by Maki Yoshikura Boitier. Additional animation, editing and compositing were by myself and music by George Demure Sounds and Sons.

The book will be published by Simon Kids UK.

Watch the trailer

Storage 24 - with titles by J. J. Guest

Storage 24, my second feature film credit as main title designer, hit the cinemas on 29th June 2012. The film was directed by Johannes Roberts and stars Noel Clarke of 'Kidulthood', 'Adulthood' and 'Fast Girls' fame.

Storage 24 sees London in chaos as a military cargo plane crashes leaving its highly classified contents strewn across the area. Completely unaware that London is in lock-down, Charlie (Noel Clarke) and Shelley (Antonia Campbell-Hughes), accompanied by best friends Mark (Colin O'Donoghue) and Nikki (Laura Haddock) are at a storage warehouse dividing up their possessions after a recent break up. When the power suddenly goes off they become trapped and a mystery predator starts to hunt them one by one.

My animation for the main titles was inspired by tumbling combination locks, with the characters spinning and changing rapidly before resolving into the names of the cast and crew. I also had the characters individually flicker as though the power supply was fluctuating, which was inspired by a scene in the film where the neon lighting fails leaving the characters in the dark. For the actual title of the film I added a video interference effect that was suggested by the static in the news reports seen in the trailer.

Read about Storage 24 at the Prime Focus website

Visit the IMDB page for Storage 24

Yak Shaving for Kicks and Giggles - a new interactive fiction by J. J. Guest

Yak Shaving for Kicks and Giggles! started life as an entry to Abbi Park's Odd Comp, a competition for ADRIFT games in which authors have to work within a rather arbitrary set of restrictions. This proved to be a good thing as the restrictions actually forced me to get the job done! This new version however is fully expanded and written in Inform 7.

You are Steve Goodwin. You're a regular guy, young, successful, dynamic. Recently promoted to the post of junior marketing executive at the Funhouse Novelty Company, you're the one who comes up with all those zany items you can buy for a Dollar in the pages of Cosmic Comics.

But something is missing in your life. A nagging question gnaws at your soul, undermines your joy at your new-found success and interferes with the very business of living. But this is not a answer you can find in the pages of any book; for what you yearn to know is the very meaning of life itself!

But then you learned about a man, a guru of great wisdom, endowed with the miraculous supreme realisation who could teach you the secrets of the universe. A six hundred year old hermit living at the top of a mountain in a kingdom most right-thinking people assume to be a myth. A man known as the Dada Lama!

And this is why we find you now, after many months of journeying, of fruitless searching, beaten and battered by the uncaring elements, in this mysterious valley hidden deep within the mountains...

...the mystical valley of Shangri-La!

Yak Shaving for Kicks and Giggles! is humorous quest for spirtual enlightenment involving a yak, a hairdryer and the abominable snowman.

Download Yak Shaving for Kicks and Giggles!

Download the FROTZ interpreter (needed to play the game offline)

Play online

More IF is available from the games page.

Cover art by Eric Forgeot

The rather brilliant programmer Mark J. Tilford (a.k.a. Ralphmerridew) has created taf2inf, a Perl script that performs a simple ADRIFT to Inform conversion, and has used my game Goldilocks is a FOX! to demonstrate its power! The upshot of this is that a brand new, all bells and whistles version of the game is now available. The conversion required a significant amount of hand-coding to complete, giving us the opportunity to make a lot of improvements to the game, including Mark's new auto-mapping system.

Staggering back from yet another wild student party, blonde bombshell Goldilocks decides to take a shortcut through the enchanted forest. All she really wants is a nice hot bowl of porridge and somewhere to sleep off her hangover - but something tells her that quaint little cottage isn't as innocent as it seems...

Goldilocks is a FOX! is a zany romp through the world of fairytales. Along the way you'll meet a host of familiar characters, albeit not quite how you remember them!

Visit the games page for more information

Play the new version online

To Hell in a Hamper - interactive fiction by J. J. Guest

The 8-bit Acorn Electron was my first ever computer; I taught myself to program in BBC Basic and even wrote a few text adventure games, most of which I never finished! Now, Dave Edwards, Electron enthusuast and head of the Electron User Group has converted my game To Hell in a Hamper to run on the Electron, BBC B, B+ and Master 128.

The game was released with EUG #67, an issue of the online magazine for Electron users, and a review can be found at Acorn Electron World. The Electron port is a very faithful copy and Dave has done an amazing job of converting it to run on the 32k machine.

Dave said: "I played the java version of it and, seeing as there were no rooms or maps, I thought it would be neat to put it onto the BBC/Elk as there's no adventure like it available for either. I have to say, as you can tell by the review, that I thought THIAH was terrific fun - very funny, and also a very good adventure for a complete beginner who might kind of think IF boring. It made me laugh out loud on many occasions!!"

Download the electron version (.ssd file)

Play the original game online