For 56 years I've been a designer and animator specialising in the design and production of 2D and 3D animation sequences for corporate, educational, training, commercial and broadcast video programmes. Animated Graphics or Motion Graphics ... I have always thought of myself as a Graphimator.

At St Martins School of Art (now Central St Martins) I stumbled on time, sound and motion which saved me from dissillusion. Leaving in 1969 with a DipAD in design and illustration I moved on via being a freelance illustrator (to pay the immediate bills for a while) to become an animator at ICEM (MacMillan's Educational Film Unit), then on, in 1971, to become MD of Pearce Studios Ltd.

The 1981 BAFTA and D&AD award winning animated graphic sequences for the BBC’s Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy TV series was followed by the introduction of one of the first commercially available 3D animation computer systems in the UK. This system was used in 1985 to provide the BAFTA award winning 3D animated graphics for the 50 minute Channel 4 feature “Max Headroom - the movie” which preceeded the TV series.

Since 1985 I've worked on my own from a studio in a barn in the Windsor and Maidenhead area of Berkshire. In 2004 I closed Pearce Studios Ltd and carried on as a Sole Trader. In addition to animation work I also took on multimedia and web site comissions with Dreamweaver and Flash, image origination and retouching with Photoshop, animation and video compositing with AfterEffects, video editing with Final Cut Pro and Cinewave, 3D modelling with FormZ, 3D animation with Electric image, and DVD authoring with DVD Studio Pro.

Between 1996 and 2009 there were one ETMA, four IVCA awards, and a BAFTA. I provided the interface design and graphics as part of the Radio4 Interactive team that updated Douglas Adams’ web game of “Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy” which won the 2005 BAFTA Interactive award. Most recent was the 2009 IVCA Bronze for Internal Interactive Media for "BP Atlantis" produced by Myriad Global Media. This also received an IVCA Highly Commended for Best Animation and Graphics.

I'm still hanging on here in the studio but these days in my advancing years, there is very little paying work. For a few years I worked as a labourer for a Gardening Team but found that 4 or 5 hours of physical effort 3 mornings a week was fine while actually doing it but eventually began to leave me worse for wear in the afternoon. So I finally resigned and we now scrape by on a pension. Most of my output now is in support of the local Community Association in the form of designing, building and maintaining the web site, designing, printing, laminating, mounting and positioning road signs and banners for events and a huge amount of designing, printing and placing of signs and banners for the local Fun Day which I am in the process of handing over to a relative youngster. I've also been the Community Flooding and Drainage rep for 15 years from which I have just now, in 2024, stepped back, despite the fact that nobody else has volunteered.

I need time to do other stuff like drawing and playing the guitar before I drop off the perch. I try to supplement the pension a little bit by posting artwork from the 1981 BBC series of Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy on eBay and selling one or two A3 prints of the same stuff. Helps a bit towards the energy bills !