Thoughts for the Void #06

Hello Void People!

I hope things are well. I am frantically writing this post in the hopes of releasing at least one Substack post in the month of November. Somehow, the month has whizzed past, and I’ve not had time to stop by and say hello! It's just a busy time of year, and I currently don’t have too much to show, as most project updates are secret. But nevertheless, a few things from my corner of the world.

I am making things, but I have nothing to show other than this single frame from a recent render test. Enjoy it, it’s all you are getting.

Some fun news - I was asked to be a judge this year at LIAF 2025. It’s been an absolute honour - not simply because it allowed me to watch some wonderful films, but it’s just so nice to be asked to do something like this. You can read a bit about it here!

LIAF is running across London from Friday 28th November to Sunday 7th December. Go check out a screening or two! It’s a lovely thing and there are some fab films.

At the start of the month, I popped to see Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest film Burgonia. I’ve been a big Lanthimos fan ever since I saw The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and I must say that this one was up there with his best. It’s funny, dark, gory, sinister, and strange - I loved it.

And that’s it! I’m sorry I have nothing else to share in this rather rushed episode of Thoughts for the Void. I’ll be back soon to show some actual work things, but I’ll leave you with a few things that I’ve read or watched this month that I found helpful.

This recent piece by Zadie Smith was a cathartic read, especially given the current cultural climate of the U.K (and indeed the shitty AI world we exist within)

You know a country by its values. By what a country values. And it turns out that what a country values can change over time. Sometimes, though, there’s a sort of cognitive delay between the country you think you are in, and the country you’ve actually become. For example, you can keep selling yourself, to foreigners, as the country of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, and luring busloads of tourists to Stratford-upon-Avon and Bath, and put a statue of George Orwell in front of the BBC, and imagine yourself a cultured and literate nation, which the rest of the world admires for its devotion to the written word – but if you then chronically underfund your cultural institutions, and treat your cultural workers with contempt, many people will suspect you of being full of it. And as the decades pass – and fewer and fewer Shakespeares and Austens and Orwells emerge from your little island – even more people will begin to suspect that in truth you do not value culture at all, and are in fact running a giant heritage museum in which the only cultural workers you respect are the dead ones.

Zadie Smith - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/11/britain-value-culture-striking-workers-a-british-library-zadie-smith

And lastly, watch this wonderful animated music video by Masanobu Hiraoka for Max Cooper and Felix Gerbelot’s track On Being. So wonderfully mesmeric and enchanting.

Thanks for reading. Tell a friend. See you in December! Loveyoubyeeeeeeeeeeeeeee