Creative Social Circle Wellington:
A Wellington-based creative social circle built around honest conversation, mutual encouragement, and long-term artistic growth. The meetup is intentionally small and focused, with only four participant slots available per night across two annual gatherings. This creates a calm, intimate atmosphere where every person has space to speak openly about their creative process, personal journey, successes, failures, and the realities of sustaining artistic work over time.
The circle is designed for creatives who share a similar outlook and energy — people interested in meaningful discussion rather than networking performances or self-promotion. Writers, filmmakers, musicians, visual artists, designers, game developers, performers, and independent creators are all welcome if they contribute positively to the environment and genuinely care about creative development and community.
Each session runs for several hours in person somewhere within Wellington, allowing conversations to unfold naturally rather than feeling rushed or transactional. Topics may include discipline, burnout, unfinished projects, experimentation, publishing, exhibitions, audience-building, creative identity, mental resilience, collaboration, and balancing art with everyday life. The aim is not competition, but solidarity: creating a dependable support network where creatives can exchange insight, celebrate progress, and stay motivated through difficult periods.
The project is intentionally scalable. While the core format remains small and curated, additional circles, workshops, collaborative spaces, retreats, or mentorship structures could grow from the original model over time. The long-term vision is to develop a sustainable creative ecosystem built on trust, consistency, shared ambition, and genuine camaraderie.
At its heart, the social circle exists to remind creatives that they do not have to build their artistic lives entirely alone.
Artists, Collectives, and the Modern Creative Commune
One of the reasons historic collectives succeeded was because they balanced shared life with private retreat. The cafés of Paris were alive with debate and movement, but artists still returned to small rooms where they could think, write, sketch, or simply recover from the intensity of social life. The same tension existed within the Beat circles: long nights of conversation followed by solitary stretches of creation. A healthy collective is not permanent noise. It is rhythm. Gathering and dispersing. Discussion and silence. Communal energy and private concentration.
In a modern creative commune, this balance becomes essential. The workshops and dining spaces may form the social heart of the building, but the sleeping rooms remain deliberately quiet and personal. One room per person. No forced dormitory atmosphere. No constant interruption. The room functions almost like a monk’s cell or a ship cabin: a place to sleep, think, read, and regain clarity. Creative people often require periods of decompression after intense collaboration, and privacy protects the long-term stability of the community. The collective should encourage encounter, not surveillance.
The shared spaces themselves would reflect another principle often neglected in romantic visions of artistic communes: cleanliness and maintenance are forms of respect. The woodshop, metal shop, prop studio, film rooms, and miniature workshops would be carefully organised and kept clean. Not sterile in the corporate sense, but orderly enough that tools remain usable, floors remain safe, and work can continue without chaos swallowing the environment. Some of the greatest workshops in history operated almost like laboratories or guild halls. Clean tools signal seriousness. They tell newcomers that the space is alive and functional rather than decaying into neglect.
This practical discipline separates sustainable collectives from temporary bohemian collapse. The myth of the “messy genius” often hides disorganisation, wasted materials, broken tools, and exhausted people. A functioning creative environment respects craft enough to maintain the conditions required for good work. Sweeping a floor, cataloguing props, oiling machinery, or organising lumber becomes part of the culture itself. The building is not merely occupied; it is cared for.
The structure of mentorship inside the commune would also matter deeply. Rather than functioning as a rigid hierarchy, the space could begin with a founding creative director or curator who establishes the tone, standards, and artistic direction of the environment. The role is not simply managerial. It is atmospheric. Curating tools, conversations, projects, aesthetics, and values. Deciding what kinds of energy belong in the space and what kinds slowly erode it.
From there, the collective evolves through apprenticeship. One particularly capable intern or assistant — someone curious, disciplined, generous, and quick to learn — gradually absorbs practical knowledge across multiple workshops. Instead of remaining permanently dependent on the founder, they eventually begin teaching others basic processes and maintaining continuity within the studios. This creates an organic transfer of culture. Skills move horizontally through the community instead of bottlenecking around one central figure.
Historically, many artistic movements depended on precisely this structure. Medieval guilds, theatre troupes, film crews, ateliers, and workshops all survived because experienced members passed techniques onward while still continuing their own creative practice. Teaching was not separate from making. It existed beside it. A prop-maker might teach mould-making in the afternoon and return to sculpting creatures at night. A cinematographer might guide someone through lighting setups before working on an experimental short film of their own.
This also protects the founder from becoming trapped in administration. The original creator can step back into personal work while remaining embedded within the life of the commune itself. That balance is important. The founder remains present — eating in the dining room, contributing ideas, building projects, occasionally mentoring — but does not become a permanently exhausted overseer. The community gradually develops its own internal intelligence.
The architecture of the place reinforces this philosophy. The noisy spaces cluster together: workshops filled with machinery, editing suites, prop rooms, miniature cities under construction, costume racks, film sets, sound experiments. Then the building softens into quieter transitional areas: libraries, reading corners, long corridors, small tea rooms. Finally, the private sleeping rooms sit apart in relative silence. A person can move between stimulation and stillness depending on what their work requires.
Meals remain central because they preserve collective identity without enforcing constant interaction. People may work at different hours and on entirely different disciplines, yet they continue crossing paths around food. The dining room becomes less like a cafeteria and more like an evolving salon. Conversations drift between practical engineering problems, story ideas, philosophy, cinema, folklore, architecture, mythology, and daily life. Some people speak constantly; others mostly listen. Both become part of the ecology.
The ultimate strength of such a place is not merely productivity. It is continuity. Most artists today create in fragmented isolation, moving between rented rooms, unstable jobs, and online platforms that rarely produce deep community. A well-designed collective offers something increasingly rare: sustained creative atmosphere over years rather than weeks. Skills accumulate. Shared language develops. Traditions form. Workshops gain memory.
Eventually the building itself becomes a kind of living artwork — not because it is perfect, but because generations of projects, conversations, and handmade objects leave traces behind. The clean studio floor, the quiet private room, the communal meal, the half-finished prop in the workshop, the apprentice teaching someone new: these ordinary repeated acts are what transform a building into a genuine creative culture.
Illuxion is a thirty-year collection of poetry exploring despair, frustration, absurdity, memory, alienation, and philosophical unease through a voice that moves between confessional intensity and surreal thought experiments. The work combines macabre imagery, emotional volatility, and introspective observation, creating an atmosphere that is simultaneously personal and mythic.
currently finishing the editing and cover art to self-publish, on Gumroad in a few weeks.
DfP is the opening entry in a larger interconnected fictional universe blending psychological horror, existential tension, speculative fiction, and philosophical unease. The comics explore distorted perceptions of reality, fractured identity, and the instability of meaning through an atmosphere of escalating uncertainty.
It’s Literary Cosmic Noir, full title: “Destined for Perfection: volumes 1-2 of 6” due vol. 1 in June, 2027. Volume Two at 60pgs is aiming for 2028.
This theatre work combines monologue-driven psychological intensity with philosophical reflection and emotional confrontation. The script explores identity, memory, artistic obsession, and the tension between performance and authenticity through intimate dialogue and emotionally charged scenes.
Short Film 1 is an experimental cinematic project focused on atmosphere, emotional tension, and philosophical subtext rather than conventional narrative structure. The film uses fragmented imagery, reflective monologues, and symbolic visual language to create a feeling of psychological dislocation and introspection.
currently in script development and pre-production, producing it myself, i may direct.
This reinterpretation of Beauty and the Beast transforms the familiar framework into a darker and more psychologically complex exploration of obsession, transformation, emotional dependency, and distorted humanity. webcomic publishing soon on insta free.
is a speculative comic exploring the psychological and social consequences of altered perception, masculinity in the early 2000s to 2010s setting.
Self publishing on Gumroad in about a month.
The lore drop adaptation of Time Pills real title: “lore drop1: Skilltree Taxidermy Cosplay 1”, expands the ideas into a broader psychological and philosophical narrative.
The longer format allows for deeper exploration of character interiority, worldbuilding, and existential tension while retaining the surreal atmosphere and conceptual focus of the original concept.
Lore drop 1 for gumroad, currently released – future issues planned including an animated short film with a high production standard, tied to the gumroad format.
This screenplay expands upon the monologue and thematic core of Short Film 1, transforming a contained emotional piece into a broader cinematic narrative. The screenplay retains the introspective and philosophical atmosphere of the original while introducing additional environments, characters, and dramatic tensions.
The work explores alienation, identity fragmentation, artistic obsession, and existential anxiety through emotionally driven scenes and symbolic visual storytelling. Rather than abandoning the original experimental tone, the screenplay amplifies it into a more expansive psychological and cinematic experience.
In final draft mode before sending to stage32 and directors, to consult/collab.
Zine 1 is a large-scale conversational project documenting sixteen extended discussions centred around nerd culture, creativity, business, media, technology, philosophy, filmmaking, games, and artistic process. Built around coffee-fueled long-form conversations, the book captures the energy of spontaneous intellectual exploration and obsessive creative discussion.
due Oct 30- nov 20 on draft2digital aiming for Barnes & Noble.
Under the Surface follows Mandy, a young woman caught between versions of herself — the life she has built in San Francisco, the possible future waiting in Brooklyn, and the fantasy of a connection she has discovered online.
The radio adaptation of Under the Surface transforms Mandy’s internal world into an atmospheric audio experience, blending narration, sound, and digital-era textures to explore a generation learning to live between physical spaces and virtual ones. A story about love, self-image, technology, and transformation.
The Shards of the Wall is an experimental multiverse anthology exploring the stories that survive beyond death. At the centre of existence stands the Wall — a vast, living archive built from preserved consciousness, where unresolved minds become eternal worlds. When the Wall fractures, 21 dream-shards emerge: self-contained realities born from memory, trauma, desire, fear, and imagination. Each shard becomes a universe of its own, shifting between horror, science fiction, fantasy, satire, mythology, and surreal comedy.
The project will be released as: a live action pilot, an animated feature film, a tabletop rpg, a video game and a 1,000-page novel to self-publish POD on Amazon’s KDP format, simultaneously digitally via Gumroad.
A novella body horror aiming for traditional publishing route.
Legacy of Justice is a digital collectable card game concept built from the foundations of tabletop experimentation and physical game design. Beginning as a paper prototype, the project explores how characters, abilities, strategy, and storytelling can evolve from simple cards into a living interactive system. The video demonstration documents the early development process, showing the handmade origins of a world designed to eventually expand into a digital experience.
All the Women I Have Never Loved is a reflective story about a man looking back across the relationships that shaped his life. Through memories of lost loves, missed opportunities, moments of connection, and the people who changed him, he revisits the women who each represented a different chapter of his journey. What begins as a story about romance becomes an exploration of memory, regret, gratitude, and the invisible ways other people leave their mark on us.
Research Project 1 is an investigation into the transformation of linear narrative into lived digital worlds. It explores the question: what happens when a story does not simply become a game adaptation, but undergoes a complete structural transformation into an interactive environment? Through theory, methodology, lived creative experience, and reflective analysis, the project develops a framework for understanding the point where expression becomes world.
Dungeon of Cats is a six-player improvisational comedy tabletop role-playing game where every dungeon encounter becomes a performance. Players navigate a whimsical dungeon by describing increasingly ridiculous actions, while the rest of the table acts as both audience and jury, voting on whether each attempt deserves to succeed. Instead of relying on complex rules or statistics, the game rewards creativity, commitment, and comedic timing, turning every turn into a miniature courtroom where the verdict shapes the story.
Focus Thought Revolution is an open-source screenplay and experimental fiction project set in a small twilight zone where reality, myth, and counterculture collide. In the spirit of lost road movies, underground comics, and outsider cinema, the story follows a pair of post-beatnik wanderers travelling through an urban landscape in a stolen Volkswagen van. Their strange road-trip of picnics, conversations, and encounters drifts toward the fictional town of Nowheresville, New Zealand — a place where forgotten people, strange communities, and buried tensions converge.
What begins as a surreal adventure gradually transforms into something darker. After a night of grotesque violence, the story rewinds and explores the lives of those caught in its aftermath — revealing the humanity, dreams, and contradictions of the people who became victims. Focus Thought Revolution examines rebellion, identity, violence, and the stories society ignores, using the language of counterculture cinema and open-source storytelling to create a fragmented portrait of a world searching for meaning.
Potato is a tribute to the chaotic spirit of unfinished underground filmmaking — a love letter to the VHS era of schlock horror, backyard effects, and friends making something ridiculous because they could. Inspired by the forgotten energy of low-budget cult cinema, the project follows the legend of a giant satanic potato and the terrifying Killer Apes from Hell, embracing the strange charm of a movie that exists somewhere between horror, comedy, and a behind-the-scenes accident.
More than a finished film, Potato celebrates the process itself: the practical effects, homemade creativity, absurd ideas, and impossible ambitions that define outsider art. Featuring the infamous beach sequence where Cory is literally set on fire as part of the madness, the project captures the reckless joy of making art with whatever resources are available — a reminder that sometimes the weirdest creations become the most memorable.
Machinima Season One explores the possibilities of using game engines and digital environments as a new form of independent filmmaking. Inspired by the early internet era of machinima creators, virtual storytelling, and DIY production, the project treats game worlds as miniature film studios where characters, cameras, and narratives can be created without traditional production limitations.
The series experiments with the intersection of cinema, games, animation, and online culture — using virtual spaces as stages for stories that could not exist in conventional filmmaking. Machinima Season One reflects the World.exe philosophy that technology is not just a tool for making art, but a medium with its own unique language.
Ham Winters is a 2D isometric video game prototype exploring character, world-building, and interactive storytelling through a handcrafted game development process. Built as an experiment in classic game design, the project investigates how small-scale mechanics, visual style, and personality can combine to create a memorable digital world.
The prototype represents the spirit of early independent games — where imagination, limitations, and experimentation often created the most distinctive experiences. Ham Winters is a study in building playable worlds from the ground up, combining design, storytelling, and technical exploration into one evolving creation.
This choreography video is the first experiment in adapting game mechanics into the language of dance, video, and visual effects. Rather than illustrating a game directly, it isolates a single rule: performers wear T-shirts printed with logic-puzzle icons, and when two people wearing matching symbols make skin contact, a light bulb illuminates. The choreography is built around searching, pairing, and activating these connections, turning the performers into moving components within a simple interactive system.
The work deliberately begins with a minimal mechanic to establish a visual grammar for future pieces. More complex ideas—such as bodies behaving like game pieces whose limbs can disappear when patterns are completed—are intentionally postponed. By reducing interaction to a single readable action, the video explores how choreography can function as a playable system, where movement follows rules instead of narrative and visual effects reveal the hidden logic connecting bodies.
The Earth – EP1: Teeth is a surreal short art film made with minimal resources about a man whose mouth is cursed by the Tooth Fairy. As the curse takes hold, his relationship with his own body becomes increasingly unstable, transforming an everyday part of himself into a site of anxiety, absurdity, and quiet horror. The film approaches folklore not as fantasy but as an invisible force that quietly governs reality.
TANKS is a 2D artillery game reconstruction project inspired by memories of the lost Acorn Archimedes era of computer games. Rebuilding the experience from memory using GameMaker, the project explores game preservation, reverse engineering, and the emotional connection players develop with forgotten software.
Rather than simply recreating a game, TANKS investigates how memory itself becomes a design tool. The prototype transforms a personal recollection into a playable experiment, capturing the spirit of classic computer games while exploring how old ideas can be rediscovered through modern tools.
The Caversham Estate is a novella about a lineage of vampires whose inheritance is not simply immortality, but the obligation to repeatedly attempt utopianism. Across generations, they establish carefully designed communities in the hope of creating a just and harmonious society, only to watch each experiment unravel under the pressures of power, desire, and the contradictions of human nature. Their endless lives allow them to revisit the same question from different eras: can a perfect society ever endure?
Monster Plus Scribbler is a narrative-driven action, strategy, and adventure game following an unlikely pair across a dying world: Dressyl, the daughter of a witch and a demon god, and a crippled ex-wrestler searching for meaning as reality slowly unravels. Together they protect a vulnerable child, learn new forms of magic, and journey toward the possibility of escaping their collapsing dimension. Exploration unfolds through carefully paced cinematic sequences inspired by games such as Another World, where atmosphere, discovery, and storytelling take precedence over constant action.
Combat shifts into expressive, close-quarters encounters inspired by the immediacy of classic arcade brawlers and fighting games rather than conventional platformers. Battles emphasise timing, positioning, and dramatic confrontations, combining strategic decision-making with tactile action reminiscent of Tekken and Golden Axe. Blending mythic fantasy, surreal world-building, and character-driven storytelling, Monster Plus Scribbler explores themes of inheritance, sacrifice, and hope in a world where every step forward is a struggle against inevitable decay.
No Plastic Smiles is a mythic fantasy adventure game in the vein of classic cult games like Freedom Force; set at the end of the age of gods. Brian Walden, the last surviving god, possesses a singular gift: one consciousness shared across multiple bodies, allowing him to exist in many places at once while remaining a single being. Beside him is Olson, the last descendant of a people who once worshipped Brian and whose civilisation has long since vanished. Having witnessed humanity’s rise together, the two carry the burden of an ancient history that the rest of the world has forgotten.
As an existential threat approaches, Olson undertakes the impossible task of gathering beings powerful enough to defend humanity. The problem is that these potential heroes have little interest in heroism. Each possesses immense abilities, but they are driven by personal obsessions, old grudges, or simple indifference rather than any desire to save the world. No Plastic Smiles explores what happens when the fate of civilisation depends not on finding chosen heroes, but on persuading deeply flawed, unwilling individuals to stand together against a future they would rather ignore.
Dungeon of Cats Digital is a cooperative comedy role-playing game that translates the improvisational spirit of the tabletop game into an online experience. Players explore absurd dungeons filled with bizarre creatures, impossible puzzles, and unpredictable encounters, where success depends less on character statistics than on creativity and performance. Instead of simply choosing actions from a menu, players pitch ridiculous solutions, bluff outrageous plans, and embrace spectacular failures, while the game encourages collaboration, humour, and emergent storytelling.
The Machinist Port is a software art piece presented as a fictional computer terminal that evolves through interaction. The user does not copy and paste, drag and drop, or work through conventional creative software interfaces—instead, they communicate through typed code commands entered directly into the terminal. The system responds by generating graphics, visual experiments, and evolving idea flowboards, creating the feeling of learning an unknown creative machine rather than operating a finished tool.