Well...

I went to school with Omar. We soon became friends as we had similar interests. Ladies, liquor, funk and music in general. We spent our musical formulative years jamming out some of the jazz and funk standards in various school groups, Omar on drums myself on bass, drums, guitar kazoo whatever I could make a noise out of basically. Ohmz has always had that vibe that great musicians do, so when I was looking for a good drummer myself and our mutual pal Metal (the persona of heavy metal, a guy who is 6ft 7 and IS very metal in everyway, hence the name), well when we were looking for a good drummer for our band we chose Omar and the product was beautiful, noise, noise, noise and more noise...perfect. Time moves on, women get in the way, you school friends pop in and out of your life until 10 years later Omar gives me a ring and says: "Dude, would you, or would someone you know be able to drum tech for us on the upcoming Kerrang tour in like a week?" - I thought for a minute and replied "sure, that'd be cool!"

So I'm getting my shit together and a few days before the tour Charlie rings me up and says: "Dude, we need you to be guitar tech instead" I replied "cool" To which he replied (remember this is two days before the tour) "oh by the way we need to play 2 tracks as well!" Bunch of fucking jokers! haha So I learnt Floods quickly at home, and mistakedly learnt Tanhauser gate instead of Deathcar haha, never mind rehearsal the day before the tour and all was good, needless to say the first leg of the tour was...erm...intersting. Still good memories and it all turned out smelling like roses in the end.

I've toured with them a few times since and look forward to working with them again soon...who knows. It's nearly always a blast and well it beats working in an office!

Much love
Amos (what my mum calls me)
Mos (what TesseracT call me)
Hugh (what everyone calls me)
Moose (what my friends call me)
Moosel (what fightstar call me)

I appear to inspire nicknames.

I was born in Atlanta Georgia USA, then moved to Berlin Germany, then Luxemburg, then Mumbai India, former Bombay, then I went to the UK for school and Dan was the first dude I met... he was walking down the hall with a skateboard under his arm.. and so was I! Later on in school I went to the theater and was so hysterical about the play, and the way in which the actor killed himself, that AL W was like: what the hell is wrong with you? and we clicked, brothers from different mothers style.

Anyway, I would hang out with all the dudes alot, but because Alex Gingell and Dan where in the same house, Id be shadowing them 24-7 cause they were up to exceptional stuff; making bombs, making computer games etc.
I learned and elaborated on alot of D's (dan) tactical rule breaking techniques, and with my buddy Taz created an underground network of tactical organised school rule breaking. Escape routes, import/export of goods, party places, sneaking, gaming etc. (I wont say too much)

Anyway, I would bug the shit out of AL. G and D by asking to use thier PCs everyday to play games like Quake/half-life etc etc and LAN games which I later started organising huge underground tournaments. One time I slipped into Ds study unoticed to play a bit and he totally wasted me. Anyway... the point is, Al G and D started showing me shiz and I started doing 3d etc and playing music...

Al W and I were busting out music regularly in our band 'BLOOM' and occasionally I jumped in with Infliction (Ds band) and did some MCing

Anywayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy, After school, Al went away for awhile around UK and I hooked up with D regularly. I went to Uni in London and there was alot of cool and creative pursuits developing. A year or two down the line Henry, Al G, D' and I were making films and Al W soon came back to London, finally dude!

After Uni I was already storyboarding alot, but with my new found CAD skillz a new passion for 3d had developed, and a sence for complete control over all things within my story and scene.

Well, what else is there, I met Omar occasionally upon music equipment sprees with Al and much later went over to Als sisters place one evening for dinner and met C', though i had no idea who he was and what he had done previously, which was way cool, cause I simply met him dude to dude. Lots of partys followed!

With the success of the dudes it has opened a wagonwide window of opportunity since especially Dan, Al W, Al G, HJ and I have a very close and similar passion for film, intelligent VFX and fastastical storyline.

When the dudes really started kicking off, I left the Uk and moved to my home country, living in the capital Amsterdam to turn over a new leaf, brush up on my professional skills and be close to my family. Soon I will move again to further my skills and grow.

The story starts when I went to secondary school (at 13) here in England.
Our boarding house was a pretty tight knit community which didn't really mix too much with the rest of the school, and most of the dudes there were a pretty cool and interesting mixture.. full of character. We had a cool basement in our house which had a music practice room, and another large area which we would turn into Deathmatch central (this was in the era of DOOM 2 LAN DM) on the weekends.

All the music equipment down there was pretty much due to the exploits of Carl Bown and D, who were in a death metal band at the time (Infliction).
They practiced with another guy in the house who played drums, and they would regularly play rock concerts and tear shit up. Later I learned drums on that same kit, and 10 years later I'm still playing and have 2 kits I love and not enough time to practice :O.

Anyway, D, HJ, Carl Bown and the rest of their year were in the year above me so I didn't socialise too much with them in the beginning, as I was spending too much time getting beaten up by the other members of their year. But I saw them around a lot and they were the mac daddy's, always on the hot tip.

I was a pretty quiet, studious dude who worked a lot and played sports, and these guys were mostly renegades who hung out, played blackjack and listened to old school metal with a bottle of jack on the shelf and porn in the trunk.

I don't really remember one particular instance of meeting Dan but I think it was kind of like we found a common orbit because of our interests. We both got into designing levels for Doom 2 as a result of the coke fueled DM insanity going on in the basements with like 15 people 2 computers and 30 large pizzas from pizza the action and some YUM YUM Chinese. We kind of designed on our own for a while, sharing tips and checking out each others levels.

About this time PK's year arrived at the house, and I gradually met pk more and more through D and general hanging about (actually the first meeting of pk and me I was hitting him with a hockey stick but that's another story and we patched that up and have been bros ever since :) ).

Anyway, Quake 1 got released and D and me decided to get serious and make a mission pack for it. This is when we really started to work together, and D, me and 2 friends (but mostly d and me lol) made Death's Dominion for Quake 1, which I'm sure is still out there on the net somewhere. Interestingly we managed to show it to some of the industry leaders in level design at the time, and years later we would actually meet and work with them for real (and D forfilled his promise of buying levelord a beer)!!
Little did we know. Anyway, gradually D was corrupting me, and I managed to scam my way out of sports for the entire year (you tell the badminton people you're doing swimming,and the swimming people you're doing badminton...you get a sick note the first couple of times to make sure you have an excuse if they come looking for you, and then if things are good you're free!), which I had become disillusioned with because of being lied to by the rugby coach (suck one). So I pretty much hid during sports time and worked on maps with D, who, being a badass had been scamming his way out of sport since they discovered coco pops.

PK was a really crazy dude who liked the wig juice, and was insane for DBZ. He dug our editing technique and constantly was on our topic asking for tips on how to get started in level design. Half life came out and I remember him making some small test maps and stuff like that. About that time I met Al W who seemed like a quiet sort of dude.
We occasionally met in PK's study for some hardcore Tony Hawk on the PS1...you know I got the high score skilllz to this day yo! Anyway Al was a talented musician who also played at school rock concerts and would jam in our basement with some other dudes
from PK's year. In fact pk was actually the drummer for their band, and blader (charlie h the photographer dude) sometimes played drums too. Did you know that we all play drums lol?

Now it's probably around november 5th in '96 or '97 and we are all going apeshit for fireworks. It's not enough to just let them off, we had to experiment to see how to make them explode.. BIGGER. For a short while D and I were a frenzied duo, concentrating
unusually hard in chemistry, and hoarding all the fireworks we could so we could cut them up and make BIGGER ones. Early attempts failed due to poor container design, but gradually our technique saw improvement. Squash balls injected with
rocket powder are excellent for creating spark showers. Making bombs with skateboard wheels is not a path to success. Small screw top bottles are awesome. Tennis balls packed with match heads and wrapped with duct tape...time consuming, dangerous and not impressive so don't bother.
Then finally I walked into D's room one morning to find him hunched over something. He showed me a half constructed pipe bomb which we duly finished and then that night went out into the middle of the empty playing field outside our boarding house. We only had a ridiculously small fuse and I was the only one crazy enough to light that sucker and run like a half beaten
to death stoat on jolt cola. It was BIG, fuck me it was big. A sound like THWOMP, earth shattering, the ground shook and there was a huge flame like 15 ft high.
Other guys and girls were following our exploits by this point and a crowd of 15 or so people ran w00ping and laughing away from the scene. Lol, I have no idea why we thought we could keep our experiments secret.

Later on we learnt the nearby hospital rang our housemaster and asked if any gas tanks had exploded or if someone had been shot - did they need any ambulances? Yikes.

Suffice to say production was steaming on pipe bomb #2, when our housemaster at the time popped his head round Dan's study door and looked at me, mallet in hand crushing rocket powder, and Dan with a 7 inch knife cutting stuff up, and called dan out. I'll never know to this day why I didn't even have another word said to me about the whole thing - either it was because I was a star
pupil they didn't want to lose, or Dan took all the blame on himself. But
Dan went to the Deputy head (who was a complete dude in those days) and argued himself out of expulsion. I took the second pipe bomb home and let it rip in a field... it wasn't as good as at night time.

So that was the end of that chapter. To this DAY every time I think of those pipebombs I thank the lord that no-one got hurt. For fucks sake no-one even think about trying it, those were time when our passion for building things and seeing pyrotechnics completely outweighed our common sense and neither of us would try making bombs that serious again.

Righty tighty, so now it's like '99 or so. We made it through GCSE's whilst working on DD, and now during A-levels we're hard at work on our most ambitious project to date: Oblivion for Quake 2, complete mission pack.
http://www.planetquake.com/lethargy/ try it out :).

By now I'm completely corrupted, and the alcohol fuelled craziness is at its peak. I really miss all the night time commando
missions, secret trips to the pub, clubs and general rule-breaking for the sake of it. Since I left the oppression of school I haven't really been bothered to do anything like what we did back there, since no-one is trying to stop us :). Our little boy is
all growns up!

Anyway here's where the dudes are really a tight unit, just at the end of school. D leaves and goes to do a design degree in london. I stay on for my final year and just get my head down and work. During thistime PK and I become much better friends. It's funny but I always got on way better with the year above me (D's year) and the year below me (PK's) then I ever did with my own year. One funny story from this period is me and a friend breaking out of the house to go to the pub. Our assistant housemaster saw us, thought we were thieves, and promptly shouted "Stop Thieves!" and chased us lol!. We split up and I immediately ran round the house and broke straight back in later Karl got back in too. The assistant hm was hailed as a hero for
chasing thieves away for months!!! We knew the truth and later let the real story be known just as we left school.

So I left Rugby, and went to Oxford to do a chemistry degree. In the hols D and I finally got into the games industry for real, working at EA on Q3: Revolution for PS2. In the next summmer hols we went to Texas to work on CS: Condition Zero at Gearbox...cue craziness and shooting machine guns at good old texan gun ranges. D stayed out there while I went back to finish my degree.

About this time we really reconnected with HJ, who had been off doing art, and PK who was now in London doing his design degree. This is really the start of the current time. Me PK HJ and D became a tight knit crew, HJ was living with D at the time, and always the creative souls we turned our attention to the world of filmmaking. Over the next few years we would make lots of little shorts, mostly played for laughs, or documenting our lives, so that we could learn all aspects of filmmaking. We founded horsie in the hedge cinema whilst zoned on coca-cola and rotoscoping light sabers for an entire week.

Anyway about then D got the call from Al W to try out for Fightstar. He got the gig, and called on me to film an early rehearsal session (I bet you'd like to see that footage huh? I will try to put it on the FS DVD). About now I finished finals and started my 4th year of research - less time consuming and mentally exhausting than Part I of the degree. I was so mentally burned out from 3 years of extreme thinking, I wanted my next goal in life to be purely physical, so I thought fuck it, why not try and see what I can do with my body? You always hear how the body is the most wonderful gift you'll ever get so I resolved to find out how far I could push myself physically, specifically how strong, how arnie-like I could naturally get, but also I wanted to be healthier after 21 years of coca-cola and pizza. Cue a painful year of not eating enough and learning that most of what I knew about nutrition was total bullshit. Lost 10lb, down to 163lb. Ironically here I find out that bodybuilding is almost 100% mental, and laugh at how I wanted nothing mentally trying...fuck it I challenged myself and there's no turning back.

So I finish my 4th year, done with Oxford. I planned to take 6 months off where, thanks to Dan's position in the band (and the
power of Charlie and his connections - you rule dude ;) ) we had the power to direct and design FS's videos ourselves and add
more credentials to our name, whilst preserving the bands complete creative control. During those 6 months off I lived with Dan
and worked on the fs video 24/7 (only breaking to eat, hit the gym, sleep and buy more food, as I finally mastered my healthier lifestyle and set about putting back on some weight. 8 months later and we had 3 videos made (Palahniuk's laughter, Laruso's Falling Apart and another video for Tokyo Dragons - all made it to Music TV), and I was 44lb heavier (30lb in those 6 months) at 206lb lol, but not from fat hehe.

Anyway, then I went of to South Africa on holiday while all the FS craziness broke. I came back and another FS video was on the cards. Now I was supposed to be heading back to Oxford to start a PHD in physical and theoretical chemistry, but I got an extention to make my break 8 months long, went back to London and worked on Paint Your Target.

After that I headed back to Oxford and started my phd where I now sit typing this spiel.

The future is extremely bright, I am very happy to see PK developing at great speed in the VFX world, he has recently got a job
at Moving Picture Company here in the UK. Fightstar are a very talented band imo, and as far as I can see can only succeed even more with time. Personally, I am honing my skills in all areas of visual effects in tandem with my work on the phd, and at the moment see myself heading in the vfx/filmmaking direction after all is said and done. HJ, D, PK and me continue to build horsie in the hedge cinema all the time and hope to make it a big and successful company in the future, as we write feature films and develop skills in all areas.

If you've read this far, shouldn't you really have something better to do?

PEACE!
Al G