I am an animation and visual effects artist/producer who has been working with the artist Jamie Hewlett and the Gorillaz design team at Zombie Flesh Eaters for the last 10 years. Whilst working on the second Gorillaz album “Demon Days” in 2005 I fell in love with an illustration used for the back cover of the album, which had 4 brilliant little Demons which were cheeky and mischievous. Each one with its own funny idiosyncrasies.

Ever since seeing that image I had always wanted to do something with those characters. On an afternoon upon which there was time to spare,  I sculpted one on my computer. The resulting sculpture was a pleasing bold form which instantly had charm,and character.

CG Still of early model

I have always been obsessed with a design and manufacture process called Rapid Prototyping. Simplistically, this is the process of sculpting a virtual object on the computer and printing it out as a real life sculpture (using large expensive machinery). I had never committed to prototyping something before. Because there had never been a design which pleased me enough to cough up the huge amount of money to do it. Finally I had a sculpture which I desperately wanted to prototype, a reason to make it had to be found. The idea of creating a light from the shape was a combination of desire to see the Demon manifested in reality, and the recent disappointment I had recently had trying to find interesting lighting to furnish my new flat.

I created a lighting effect within the scene in which I had sculpted the virtual Demon, and took some snap shots of it. It instantly looked great, so I took them to show to Jamie. He loved it immediately and was very enthusiastic about the whole idea. After that I did some research made a few enquiries into manufacture processes etc. But ultimately the project lay dormant for a year or so.

I kept thinking about how it would actually work. Would it stand up? Where does the bulb go? etc….After constantly studying every lighting product I came across I fleshed out some designs.
This was followed by a lot of research, contacting many factories, suppliers and safety specialists. Several months later I had a final design with suppliers and costs lined up. After going this far, I had to go through the  tedious process of creating a business/financial plan and working out a distribution pipeline.

In the summer of 2009 we produced a working prototype of the lamp. It looked fantastic and the whole project was given an almost immediate green light from investors. The final and most painful process of all was going through months and months of safety consultation and testing. For such a simple product you can not believe the enormous pile of paper work and calculations that have to be made.

After a few more months ironing out the details and wrangling prices down as best I could, manufacture began in September 2009. In the mean time I put together the packaging, instructions and marketing material. Enlisting the help of Gorillaz web master Mike Robinson to get the whole web shop online (for the price of a lamp). Eventually in Christmas 2009 with everything in place and the Demon Lamps went on sale.