BIOGRAPHY
BIOGRAPHY
Childhood
performing included a professional magic act at the age of 8
and a live puppet show at age 9 that ended in a custard pie
fight. He spent many a day backstage exploring the workings
of live shows as his older sister performed in Pantomimes
such as Babes In The Wood at the London Palladium. After
becoming fascinated by The Muppet Show, he knew that was the
future for puppetry. He first met Jim Henson and his
puppeteers as a fan in 1977, later becoming a regular visitor
to the set of The Muppet Show bringing along home made Muppet
style puppets and learning and receiving much encouragement
from Jim Henson and his co-workers.
Upon leaving school he directly landed his first job as a
Muppeteer in 1980 being personally chosen by Jim Henson to
work on The Great Muppet Caper filling in on crowd scenes and
doubling up for main characters. This directly led to
building Podlings and Slaves for The Dark Crystal and then
actually performing the Slavemaster Skeksis for the film.
Many Muppet and creature film and television projects
followed including the fan favorite alien Millennium Falcon
copilot Nien Nunb on Return of the Jedi and assisting Frank
Oz with the evergreen lovable Yoda.
Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, whilst continuing with
his puppeteering career, he joined forces with fellow puppet
master David Barclay to create Ultimate Animates, a
production company created to experiment and develop new
building and performing techniques for many of their own
internal as well as external puppet productions. This led to
Mike directing and producing many productions.
A natural progression for Mike was to explore the use of
computer graphic technologies to assist and to open up the
performing and acting possibilities for his characters. By
early 1997 he moved to San Francisco to become a character
animator for Pixar after being impressed by their character
work in Toy Story. Although he animated on A Bug's Life, his
finest moment at Pixar was most definitely developing and
animating on the 1950s style TV puppet show Woody's Round Up
on Toy Story 2.
His desire to go full circle took him next to George Lucas's
ILM, first animating the famed dinosaurs in Jurassic Park 3,
then moving on to animate on Yoda along with many other
creatures in Star Wars Episode 2.
Fresh from his time as an animator, he is busy acting on
stage and screen and also once more puppeteering with the
Muppets. He is also be pursuing character voice over work,
and developing many of his own independent productions for
future film and television projects.
PRODUCING AND DIRECTING
The Huva And Thing Show
1990
- Daily Children’s Programme
Directed many months worth of episodes of this well loved
puppet show for The Children’s Channel, broadcast
simultaneously in two languages in the UK and Holland. This
three camera shoot also involved extensive use of chromakey.
Cameras were cut as live. Also wrote several episodes.
Pitterpatio
1991 - Pilot
Directed
(and unofficially co-produced) this pilot for Spanish
television to teach English as a foreign language to
pre-schoolers. Featured original songs, puppets and a human
presenter Stephanie Lowe (wife of Phillip Schofield). Picked
all key crew members (set designer, composer etc.) for the
shoot. Off lined and oversaw all post production.
The
Vivi Encounter
1991 - Promotional Short in HD for Feature Film
Shot entirely in Switzerland, Mike directed produced
this unique short promo for a prospective feature film using
the Sony High Definition Video System. It featured an
animatronic costumed creature and a human in a scene from the
film. Mike designed the cave set, drew up the storyboards,
and shot single camera film style. He hired film veteran
Derek Browne as Camera Operator and Cinematographer. Even
though the only cameras in existence at that time were tube
cameras, prime lenses were used and a very creative look was
achieved. He did all off line editing and supervised all the
post production and music and effects mixing, including an
early use of a Quantel’s High Definition Paint Box for
visual effects.
Berzircus
1992 - Two Pilots
Directed
two versions of this pilot for RTE Television. One in the
English language using english speaking actors and one in the
Irish Gaelic language using Irish speaking actors. Off lined
and oversaw all post production. The show was designed to
teach lesser used languages to children using the languages
of that country. Ultimately the pilots were a success and led
to many television series being produced in Ireland, Scotland
and Wales in their respective Gaelic languages. This show was
renamed Mira Mara.
The
Great Bong
1993 - Television Series
This was a co-production between Mike’s company
Ultimate Animates and HTV. The series aired on HTV and
Channel 4. Mike co-produced all 26 x 11 minute episodes of
this off-beat family puppet series. He directed 6 episodes,
making camera scripts and live cutting in the gallery and
directed all the location shoot and opening and closing
titles, single camera, film style. He also directed all
pre-recordings of the celebrity voices featuring Spike
Milligan, Michael Bentine, Barbara Windsor and Stanley Unwin.
He performed all the off line editing and supervised all post
production foley, FX and mixing.
Action
Annie
- Pilot
Directed and story boarded full length puppet performed
entirely against green screen. Puppet characters were layered
onto drawn backgrounds. Annie herself even had some post
production facial morphs.