Arkara World is an animated gateway into my portfolio, designed to introduce how I think before introducing what I make.

Rather than opening with a conventional landing page, I imagined my portfolio as a place visitors could arrive at. I created a retro-futuristic world of architecture, traffic, color, and motion, with my identity built directly into the environment. On the live site, the animation loops continuously behind a simple Enter button, turning a functional navigation moment into an invitation to step inside.

The project brings together illustration, motion design, worldbuilding, personal branding, and interaction design to establish one creative world broad enough to contain the different kinds of work throughout my portfolio.

I've always been drawn to designed places that make imagination feel tangible, environments that don't simply tell you a story, but invite you to enter one. That became the starting point for Arkara World. Instead of treating my portfolio as a digital container for finished projects, I treated it as my creative home. The intro became its front gate: a first glimpse of the world before the visitor steps inside. Art, Craft, Technology, and Storytelling became the framework for building it, four parts of my practice brought together in one experience.

Instead of applying a logo on top of the experience, I wanted the world itself to function as the identity. Arkara World imagines my portfolio as a place visitors can enter: a futuristic creative theme park where ideas, stories, and experiments exist as attractions waiting to be discovered. Rather than simply viewing a collection of projects, the entrance itself becomes a metaphor for stepping into my imagination, and the world that connects them. 

I was inspired by the way designed environments can transform imagination into something tangible. Future-focused locations like Tomorrowland and Epcot sparked the idea of inviting guests into a vision of what could be, while retrofuturist influences such as The Jetsons and Syd Mead’s concept art shaped the visual language of the world: optimistic technology, bold architecture, and a future imagined through the lens of another era. Rather than recreating an existing theme park, I wanted to capture the larger idea behind them: the feeling of arrival. 

The flying vehicles, futuristic architecture, and constantly moving environment create the sense that Arkara World is already alive before the visitor enters, a place built from curiosity, creativity, and possibility. The Arkara World name is integrated directly into the architecture, while the buildings, vehicles, typography, color, movement, and atmosphere all contribute to the same visual language. Personal branding becomes spatial: not just something a visitor sees, but somewhere they can imaginatively step inside.

Motion turns the illustration from a destination into a living place. Flying cars move through different layers of the skyline while traffic passes across the foreground, creating depth, rhythm, and a continuous sense of arrival. Because the animation loops, the environment remains active for as long as the visitor stays on the page rather than playing as a one-time intro sequence.
The interaction itself is intentionally simple. Enter is both interface and narrative: clicking it navigates into the portfolio while completing the metaphor of entering Arkara World. Before visitors see what I make, I want them to understand how I imagine.

This project is an alternate title sequence for The Secret Garden (1993). Each choice in the film came down to what benefited the tone of the movie best. The book was published in 1911, and the film is set around 1900, so I looked to Late Victorian and Early Edwardian aesthetics for inspiration. I was inspired by the illustration style of that era, not the formal paintings, but the images seen in print media like books, newspapers, and fashion plates. I wanted the title sequence to look like one big book or newspaper brought to life and color, so I relied on moving still images in a linear 2D fashion. 

The sequence uses botanical and animal illustrations, along with keys and locks to represent the locked-off nature of the garden. Each actor’s title card was inspired by something associated with their character. For example, Kate Maberly’s is a ship because Mary Lennox begins her journey on a ship to Yorkshire, Heydon Prowse’s is “behind” a window because Colin Craven is confined indoors. 

This is about taking time to appreciate the small things and be present in the quiet moments of one’s life. I likened “going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear” to a current, so I animated the text like water, taking its journey from raindrops through the river, then reaching the mouth and just floating. The images were generated in Midjourney and then animated with the typography in After Effects. The quiet moments in life are never really quiet; there’s always sound, even if it’s small. So I wanted to incorporate ambient noise, because these are the types of sounds people hear in the quiet moments of life, and it adds to the overall serenity of the piece. 

This film was an exploration of AI’s early attempts at animation. The story follows a father and daughter duo as they visit a bookstore and are transported into the stories they read. It’s about not leaving wonder behind as we grow up, and how parents have a formative role in how a child take sin the world—they have the power to make it amazing.

The images were generated using Midjourney in a retro anime style, then animated using early versions of RunwayML and Pika’s Beta Model. After Effects was used to enhance the animations, add additional effects, smooth transitions, and patch up flaws in the AI’s animation process.