The studio’s curriculum

Learn.

The studio’s position is that this work is learnable. The tutorials and articles here are organised into seven parallel ladders. Pick a route, work the rungs in order, fill in anything I haven’t written yet from the further-reading links on each tutorial.

Some rungs are still in preparation — marked clearly, not pretending otherwise. As they get written they get linked.

Camera fundamentals up through printable prints

Photography to Long-Exposure

Starts with a camera in manual mode and a dark room; ends with a calibrated, signed long-exposure print on archival paper. Three rungs visible today; one more in preparation.

  1. Rung 1 · in preparation

    Camera fundamentals (manual exposure)

    In preparation. Aperture, shutter, ISO, the exposure triangle, manual focus, RAW vs JPEG. Read the further-reading Wikipedia ladder on the tutorial below until this lands.

  2. Rung 2

    Your First Long-Exposure Light Painting

    Camera, place, tool, frame, shutter, gesture. The first photograph is always the same.

  3. Rung 3

    Calibrating the Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1100

    How the bureau actually does it. Monitor at 120 cd/m² and D65 first, paper ICCs from Hahnemühle / Canson / Ilford, soft-proof in Relative Colorimetric, A4 test strip before any A2, sign after a 24-hour cure. With grateful credit to Keith Cooper at Northlight Images.

  4. Rung 4

    From Photograph to 3D Object

    Capture, voxelise, marching cubes, Blender cleanup, OpenSCAD waveguide channel, SLA print + acrylic rod insertion. The full studio pipeline.

Movement discipline, eyes closed, then flame

Poi to Fire to Performance

Starts with a sock with a tennis ball in it. Ends with a fire kata held confidently in a dark field. The first rungs are the body learning the geometry; the later ones add fuel.

  1. Rung 1 · in preparation

    Sock Poi to Three-Beat Weave

    In preparation. The first thousand hours: holding the cord, the forward spin, the three-beat weave from cold, eyes closed.

  2. Rung 2

    Spinning Fire Poi Safely

    Not a beginner tutorial. The body needs the kata before fire enters the picture. Kit, site, light-up, kata, end.

  3. Rung 3

    Year One, Fire

    Field record of the first year: sock poi to three-beat weave to first lit chain in the back garden, alone.

Solder a single LED, build a rig that photographs sharp

Wiring to POV LED Rigs

Starts with one LED on a breadboard. Ends with a Teensy-driven persistence-of-vision rig that locks to angle and writes pixel-accurate images into space.

  1. Rung 1 · in preparation

    Your First Addressable LED

    In preparation. Wiring a single WS2812 / NeoPixel from an Arduino-class microcontroller. Power, data, level-shifting, the obligatory blink.

  2. Rung 2

    Building a POV LED Rig

    Bill of materials, mechanical balance, electrical (level shifter / capacitor / Hall sensor), firmware via FastLED, the first-test debug ladder.

  3. Rung 3

    Programming Frames for a POV Rig

    From a regular image to the per-column polar data the firmware wants. Gamma, brightness budgets, the angular reference, three test patterns.

  4. Rung 4

    Why I Build My Own Rigs

    The article that argues the bench-built approach. Angle-sync vs time-sync; the architectural choice that makes the photographs land sharp.

From first hover to FPV cinewhoop 360

Drones and Aerial Capture

Starts with a beginner drone in an empty field. Ends with FPV through DJI Goggles plus an InAir head-tracker and a Xreal AR overlay, capturing 8K 360 cinewhoop fly-throughs.

  1. Rung 1 · in preparation

    Your First FPV Drone Flight

    In preparation. CAA registration, op-id, where to fly legally in the UK, the controller stick map, first hover, first orbit, landing without crashing.

  2. Rung 2 · in preparation

    Capturing 360 with the Avata

    In preparation. The Avata 360 in dual-lens mode, equirectangular capture, mission planning for cinewhoop fly-throughs, post in DaVinci Resolve.

  3. Rung 3

    Aerial — the studio's fleet, the FPV pipeline

    Five airframes, one pipeline. Editorial aerial, FPV cinewhoop fly-throughs, aerial light-painting commissions, 360 immersive capture.

  4. Rung 4

    First Light

    Field record of the studio's first LED-modified airframe flight.

From slicer to embedded waveguide

3D Printing and Object Production

Starts with a small SLA printer and a test cube. Ends with a resin sculpture carrying an acrylic waveguide grown along the trace of a photographed gesture.

  1. Rung 1 · in preparation

    Your First SLA Print

    In preparation. Choosing a small resin printer, setting up the slicer, calibrating exposure, cleaning and curing prints, post-processing the surface.

  2. Rung 2

    From Photograph to 3D Object

    The studio's pipeline: capture, voxelise, marching cubes, Blender cleanup, OpenSCAD channel, SLA print, acrylic rod insertion.

  3. Rung 3

    Lighting a Waveguide Object

    The per-piece optical engineering: LED choice (CRI matters), coupling, scattering, driving, PWM dimming, modes.

  4. Rung 4

    Belt-Printed Wall Reliefs

    The parametric counterpart to figurative SLA work — CR-30 belt printer producing continuous chain-mail and dragon-scale reliefs.

ComfyUI, SAM2, marching cubes, all on one consumer GPU

Local AI Pipelines

Starts with installing ComfyUI on a laptop with a decent GPU. Ends with a nine-second local pipeline that turns a text prompt or a photograph into a watertight printable STL.

  1. Rung 1 · in preparation

    Your First Local AI Image Generation

    In preparation. ComfyUI install, Stable Diffusion model selection, the basic text-to-image graph, why local matters.

  2. Rung 2 · in preparation

    SAM2 Segmentation

    In preparation. Wiring Meta's Segment Anything Model 2 into ComfyUI or a standalone server; the click-to-mask workflow; the embedding cache trick.

  3. Rung 3

    Nine Seconds from Prompt to Printable

    The studio's full local pipeline. SDXL + SAM2 + marching cubes + watertight STL, glued together by a Python orchestrator, running on a single RTX 3080 Ti.

Three.js scenes through to VR-mirrored gesture

WebXR and Immersive Systems

Starts with a Three.js scene in a browser. Ends with a real-world poi performance captured by camera and mirrored live into a WebXR scene through clip-on POV LED bezels.

  1. Rung 1 · in preparation

    Your First WebXR Scene

    In preparation. React Three Fiber, the WebXR foundations, getting a scene into a Quest 3 browser, the basic controller-input loop.

  2. Rung 2

    VR as a Psychological System

    Twenty-two years of thinking about VR as cognitive system: presence (Slater), embodiment (Ehrsson), attention (Kahneman), telepresence and its losses.

  3. Rung 3

    VR POV Controllers — the Studio's Product

    Clip-on POV LED bezels for Meta Quest 3 and Valve Steam Frame controllers. Real-world light painting and VR-mirrored gesture at the same time.

  4. Rung 4

    Sellotape and Tilt Brush

    The fifteen-year origin: standing in a small flat with a prototype VR controller, swinging it like poi, watching the trail render as volume.

Two parallel browsing surfaces

This page organises the writing by learning path. The tutorials index shows the same pieces in reverse-chronological order if you just want to browse what’s landed recently. The articles index holds the longer-form pieces that sit alongside the ladders.