Rather than chronologically detail the complex overlapping forms of work and experience that are the bedrock of everything I've published under the banner of Collative Learning since 2007, I'll instead summarize and categorize the main pillars below. A more personal summary of my early years will be presented at the end of this page. Of course, this isn't the entire story ... no biography ever is.

 

WORKING WITH PEOPLE

MENTAL HEALTH

Over a ten year period worked in mental health day day centres (running activity groups in art, computing and other subjects), mental health day centres (providing daily living support & running activities). Clientelle included schizophrenics, trauma victims, learning disabilities.

YOUTH WORK & CHILD CARE

Worked two years running and assisting personal development groups for teenagers from disadvantaged backgrounds in Liverpool and the Isle of Man. Also worked for total of approx two years with children in care, which frequently included children with severe behavioural problems.

HOMELESS SERVICES

Over a twelve year period worked in several homeless hostels in the Liverpool area. Duties included office administration, liasing with rehousing and benefits services, psychologists, psychiatrists and clientelle families. Diffusing aggression and dealing with violence aftermaths were frequent parts of the job. Alcoholism and drug addiction also a frequent factor among clientelle.

PROBATION

Over a six year period worked in several probation hostels in and just outside Liverpool area. Duties included liasing with police, enforcing curfews, diffusing aggression and liasing with rehousing and benefits services, psychologists, psychiatrists and families of clientelle. Residents included violent offenders, pedophiles, drug addicts and alcoholics.

COUNSELLING & THERAPY

Ran a personal development private practice intermittently over a period of three years, applying the above techniques.

PSYCHOLOGY, HYPNOSIS, MEDITATION, NLP

After initial self-education through books on these subjects and applying the methods to myself, I got involved with practice groups locally in Liverpool, where I could learn to use the techniques interpersonally. In these context I learned how to do hypnotic inductions and apply therapeutic benefits during those states. Eventually moved up to running my own training sessions. At the same time I was applying many of these techniques with volunteering family and friends, and within the other fields of work described above, though in a more casual manner rather than using full trance-inductions (these things can often be done conversationally or with extremely mild forms of relaxation).

Additional studies include the works of Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, Fritz Perls and personal development authors such as Dale Carnegie and Tony Robbins.

Over the years I've sought to combine the best methods from all these fields under my own banner, which I call Collative Learning Systems (a PDF book of the same name, summarizing most of this combined work, is available on the PSYCHOLOGY page of this site).

 

FILM MAKING

At age 27 (with no prior training or experience) wrote, co-produced, directed and edited a 35 min short film with a crew of approx twenty people. Two more half hour short films followed over the following four years. Films were screened at several small festivals and film nights. In 2012 wrote, produced, directed and edited 86 min experimental feature film Turn In Your Grave with a cast and crew of over thirty people. All these films included embedded subliminal communication along the lines of what is explored in my film analysis videos.

In between the above projects I worked on approx a half-dozen indie film projects by other producers / directors. On these projects I sometimes took individual production roles such as cinematographer, production planning, script revision and / or editing.

For two years attended the Basement Film Unit, which was formerly attended by author / director Clive Barker (of Hellraiser fame). At this group I frequently ran training groups in aspects of production design.

 

FILM ANALYSIS

Initially started as part of group presentations for the Basement Film Unit (see above), I expanded this into video presentations for the, then new, Youtube platform. These videos rapidly acquired an audience of tens of thousands within a few months and have since been cited as pioneering the video essay film analysis format. Over the years I've continually refined my film analysis methods, often breaking new perceptual ground on classic movies and verbalizing aspects of the films that audiences felt, but nobody had yet articulated. My total number of film analysis videos now numbers in the hundreds. The videos have also received extensive coverage across various popular media and academic sources since. Correspondence has been received from many academics and from cast / crew involved in several of the films I've published on.

Today my main Youtube channel Collative Learning (mainly used for film analysis) has over 260k subscribers and my combined Youtube channels (not including videos since transferred back to paywall access on this site) have collected over 48 million views.

My brand of film analysis incorporates the Working With People and Film Making experiences outlined above, which makes them uniquely experience-based and observational, while the majority of other Youtube "film analysis" channels are largely restricted to "Easter Egg" details or merely accumulating production history factoids already published by other sources.

To explore my backlog of both free and paid film studies, head to my FILM ANALYSIS page.

 

VIDEO GAME DESIGN

In the early 1990's I worked in the video game industry as a graphic artist and animator. My first project was the 1994 racing game Power Drive. I did the environmental graphics for the Game Gear version. Of course the graphical abilities of the Game Gear were very limited, but it was a starting point.

Having left the industry in my early twenties to work in mental health and eventually in film making, I returned to my old love of video games in 2023 after my daughter kept asking me to create mods for the video game Minecraft. I produced six large mods for the game, which have since been downloaded by Minecraft players over 100k times. While developing these projects I expanded my range beyond mere graphics and got into programming.

Since 2024, I've been working part time on a full video game project of my own called TO THE DEATH. This is a solo project, in which I'm the programmer, graphic artist / animator and sound / music designer. This game is far more advanced than any game project I've ever worked on before and is approx 70% completed. It's available in early access for PC players via the Steam Website.
A free demo version is also available via the Steam website. Please feel free to play and review either version.

 

EDUCATIONAL ACTIVISM

Occassionally over the years I've applied my learnings to forms of educational activism. One of the major ones was a ten year plus battle with a company called Metropolitan International Schools Ltd. This company was running a large scale home study training course scam operation. I explosed their activities in 2009, providing information that assisted customers to acquire their refunds. The company tried to sue me, but dropped its case after a substantial written defense was submitted to the court. A long-term smear campaign was conducted against me, some of which I later traced back to the company and people associated with it. Later I sued the company, along with two other associated parties, for defamation and harrasment. All three parties settled out of court.

A more positive endeavour has been my videos on treatments for Acid Reflux (300k views on Youtube) and Chronic Sinus Infections (100k views on Youtube), both of which I'd suffered with for years and had eventually cured through unique combinations of alternative treatment. It took a great deal of reading the available literature and experimenting after failed advice from multiple doctors.

Other educational videos that have had considerable reach include my breakdowns of the Leaving Neverland "documentary" allegations against the late Michael Jackson, and my substantive report on the pederasty allegations against Arthur C Clarke. Another has been my three part breakdown of theories about the death of Stanley Kubrick.

 

ART & MUSIC

Electronic music was a major passtime in my late twenties and led to scoring the music for one of my short films in the early 2000's and the score for my first feature film in 2012. I've since scored the music for my first video game.

Drawing and painting was a major part of my life until I began film making (details below).

 

EARLY YEARS

Born Liverpool, England, 1973. Parents were aged 17 at time of my birth. First seven years grew up in the Netherley district of the city. Unemployment in Liverpool was high and crime was rife, but my Father did his psychiatric nurse training when I was a toddler. This allowed us to emigrate in 1980 to a town called Ponoka in Alberta, Canada (I was age 7).

Moving to Canada was both an adventure and a culture shock. The more financially prosperous society, open access to nature landscapes and far less "class" based culture contributed to a very different set of social attitudes. Adapting at a young age was a character building exercize.

Five years later, due to marital problems my parents were experiencing, we returned to Liverpool, England. By this point my personality had already grown in a different direction to my original city / national roots. Adapting back to the much less healthy social attitudes of Liverpool was an even bigger culture shock. I attended multiple schools as my parents repeatedly moved address across the city to districts including Bootle, Knotty Ash and eventually settling in Garston. All of these schools and neighbourhoods were racked with behavioural problems among the children. The country's youth were in serious trouble in terms of educational opportunities, with only approx 15% acquiring work or going into higher education upon leaving school. Garston itself was cited in a parliamentary debate in 1983 as having over 9000 unemployed (most of the entire adult population of the district) with only 100 job vacancies available in the area.

The above links are some of the very few, now publicly available, stats from the period, but the reality was worse. Liverpool was one of many cities full of children who were being slowly traumatized, collectively, by street violence and poverty, brought on by lack of opportunity and an increasing sense of desperation at the perception of a rigged system. It was during this era that some of my most formative experiences occurred. Caught up in the culture of recreational drugs and street crime (joy riding and vandalism were commonplace), while my parents' marital problems led to complete family break-up, and combined with a feeling that the future offered no hope whatsoever, I became increasingly isolated, withdrawing emotionally from everyone around me.

Twice in my teens I was referred to psychologists on account of my increasing withdrawal from my own family and disinterest in building social connections. Freguently moving address since age seven had led me to believe that social connections weren't worth building because they kept being severed. I had also come to perceive most people as being mentally imprisoned by the peer pressure influences of their own backgrounds. My own, more varied, experience of very different social contexts (different countries, different districts of Liverpool, different schools) had clearly demonstrated to me how most people do not allow themselves to think or behave according to their own personal instrinct, instead rigidly conforming to what their collective peers permit them to think and do. Even if the collective peer pressures are senseless and destructive, most people still conform to them. and this is what I was seeing among my youth peers ... people who took drugs, picked fights, stole cars, verbally abused random people in the street, and who perceived almost any kind of intellectual pursuit or empathy for others as being signs of weakness.

There were many thousands of us across the city. commonly referred to as "scallies". Despite my experience of Canada, I was getting caught up in their philosophy, their ideology of cold, hard emotional disconnection from society itself. I trusted virtually no one. My self-esteem was extremely low and, like most youth caught up in the same situation, I tried to mask over it with hostility and a tendency to insult and humiliate others as a cheap defense mechanism.

However, there were a few factors that assisted me to break out of both the mindset and the practical circumstances I was caught up in. There was my ability to recognize the peer pressure patterns for what they were, based on being lucky enough to have experienced life outside of the slums. This was essential. There was also another sudden change of address. I was living with my Father after my parents' break up, still in Garston, but we moved to Bootle in the north end of the city. The neighbourhood had the same eceonomic and social problems (bad enough that two local ten year old boys kidnapped and tortured to death a two year old just a five minute walk from my street, the world famous Jamie Bulger murder case), but I had the benefit of not knowing anybody in the area and I endeavoured to keep it that way. I cut myself off from my friends back in Garston because I knew they had been negatively affecting me for years. And I started to rethink my life. At that point my Father went to work in Bermuda, but I was not accepted to go with him because I'd left school. And I couldn't live with my Mother as she had remarried. Frankly, if I was her I wouldn't have took me in either, given the cold attitude I now had. And so I ended up living alone in a very cheap bedsit in Anfield for the next two years, unemployed and unqualified for work. This period of even greater isolation was of great benefit because it forced me to stand on my own two feet and survive, as well as giving me an opportunity to get to know myself, free of peer pressures and expectations.

SELF-THERAPY THROUGH ART AND PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT BOOKS

For some reason artistic expression has always been a communicative urge for me. Even before my major life traumas started I was drawing regularly at around age five. Most young children seem to go through an artistic expression stage, but for some reason many grow out of it by their teens (or lose confidence to continue with it?). That urge never left me, but it has changed form many times in my life, from drawing and painting to electronic music to writing fiction stories to film making ... and other shades between.

The only sense I've been able to make of this artistic urge is a feeling that art transcends the rigid, verbal logic of the unconscious. Art reaches people on a deep unconscious level that surpasses the limits of spoken language. And so, art has always allowed me to hack my way past the consciously perceived "rules", allowing me to express my own (often unconscious) thoughts and feelings directly to the unconscious minds of others. All of my life I've found this incredibly powerful and in every social context. In every school I went to in childhood I was renowned as being the "best artist" in my class, and often as the best in the entire school, even if there were several classes of older kids in the same bulding. At age eight I had my entire class line up to have me sketch out various imaginary creatures that they could then colour in at their desks. A year later I won an art competition designing a poster for mass distribution to promote a major rodeo event in Alberta. Even during my darkest "scally" years in Garston, I continued to draw and paint, usually infusing imaginative sci-fi and horror concepts into the images. And, to my surprise at the time, even the local youth, when I showed them these paintings, would step out of their usual intensely anti-social attitudes and express fascination, even appreciation, at what I'd created. It was clear to me that art was a means of expression that defied oppressive conformity, though I couldn't have articulated it that way at the time.

While living alone for two years in my late teens, I began shaping my artistic abilities into something that might lead to employment. But I'd left school without qualificationsso college attendance wasn't an immediate option - it would require me to do a two year "access course", which I considered a total waste of time as I already had art skills that surpassed most art students. So I started educating myself in computer graphics and computer animation at home. Eventually this would lead to my first job working in computer games. However, I was still an emotional and psychological mess. I didn't know how to relate to people because I'd become too hostile, too competitive and too impersonal - all defense mechanisms stemming from accumulated trauma.

Luckily, my Father had instilled in me, from an early age, an interest in the subject of psychology. After all, he was a trained psychiatric nurse. Even before the age of ten, he had shown me some of his books on psychology and would often explain psychological aspects of movies we were mutual fans of. He didn't do this in a structured educational way. He just threw it into the mix from time to time, usually just a brief comment or two about what a character was thinking and what their underlying motivation was, but it was strong enough to impact me. I started transferring these psychological insights to the grand movie of real life. And it wasn't just my Father's comments that were having this effect. The movies themselves were doing the same. My favourite movies were teaching me about the subtleties and motivations of human behaviour in many contexts. Movies were, for me, not just entertainment. They highlighted complex truths that normally were buried beneath the chaos and static of daily life.

And so, while living alone for two years in my late teens, having very little contact with anyone except my divorced parents and my brother, I instinctively sought to enhance my understanding of myself and others through deeper reading on psychology. I'd already browsed through many psychology and personal development books found in my Father's collection as I was growing up, but never with the conscious intention of solving my own problems .

I read, and applied to myself, concepts from dozens of books from Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People to Tony Robbins' Awaken the Giant Within. And a pattern I noticed is that it wasn't the academically promoted writers who were offering the best advice. It was the writers who were result-oriented and willing to go against the supposed consensus. Theory vs result.

Through this combination of book-based self-education in psychology and self-training in computer animation, I acquired the social confidence and technical ability to acquire my first job, not just defeating my own communication inhibiting past traumas, but also disproving people who were telling me I was being unrealistic and would need to go to college before I could get a job. This breakthrough boosted my confidence and improved my financial situation, allowing me to quickly move forward and work in multiple fields (again and again doing so without formal academic training) over the following decades since.