AB
Hello! My name is Alfie Bramley. I am 22 years old, I drink way too much tea, and this is a page all about me!
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I recently graduated with a Bachelors Degree in Game Art from Falmouth University, officiating a passion for creation that I have had all my life. I've been personally making art ever since I was two. Ask anyone in my family and they'll tell you how I would boss them around, ordering them to draw me fantasy creatures, specifying colours and sizes and all sorts. It's a little bit of a joke that I myself started drawing because my family didn't get my specifications right, so I just got fed up and decided to do it myself. To avoid offending my lovely family, I will say that is only slightly correct.
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I am very fortunate to have had a very well-travelled childhood. My father made a point of showing my brother and I new places and cultures, and I have been very lucky to visit some places that others dream of. I have seen the Mona Lisa and toured Studio Ghibli, I have rode camels and drank water from mountain springs. These experiences and more have given me a deep desire to incorporate and appreciate things that are different and unusual into my artwork. It is also very little wonder that my favourite genre is fantasy, given how fantastical our real world is.
My main drive for my own work is a desire to tell a story. In a way, it is both the means and the end. I love the idea of being able to weave a grand complex narrative that wraps up the reader and carries them along like a river, especially if when they walk away, they realise that they'd actually like to jump in the water again. I can credit the Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett for empowering this drive: in particular, the way he describes magic and the power of words, which just scratches an itch in my brain. Many other books have fascinated and excited me: his books have inspired me. If I can write a story about the post office that will make someone question their existence then I can die a happy man.
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Growing up as an autistic youth, I found I would often completely misunderstand social interaction. Other people and their subtleties were a source of great confusion to me. As such, having things explained to me, or being given sets of instructions, became incredibly important to me: without something set out clearly for me, I would freeze and hesitate. Over the years I have been able to combat this inability to act through hard work and personal reflection, and I can credit this to two key activities: acting and studying philosophy.
Acting taught me how to look through another person's eyes and understand how they think. Philosophy taught me how to look at existence and question how and why it actually works. Together they taught me how to look at and understand myself, and when coupled with my desire to tell stories, they drive me to tell stories that make the reader question everything.
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Of course that is all rather grandiose and a little exaggerated, but I do truly find that there are few greater pleasures than speaking words and watching someone's eyes widen with realisation. My current Dungeons and Dragons campaign is all about making my players question their character's beliefs and motivations, and my favourite games are all about questioning the machinations of greater things. If it wasn't already apparent, I am also a colossal nerd for lore, and I will happily spend hours either reading on the lore of a game, or writing my own. The deeper and more existential it is, the better. I can clearly point to the Dark Souls series of games for giving me a love of dark, god-questioning fantasy, and I can single out the Elder Scrolls series for fanning my passion for character creation and roleplay. The result is my focus on creating things that entice, enthrall and amaze.
Having just said all that about my own work, however, I must own up to some of my faults. Being so focused on creating intricate, mind-blowing stories with rich narratives means that I can become obsessive over small details. However, this attention to detail serves me very well when I work on projects with other people.
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Working on my own stories, with no need to accomodate the voice of others, my work is intricate and meticulous, but I will also freely admit that it is heavy and laden with so many details that it can, ironically, become even blander.
Working with others is like being a whole other me. Bouncing ideas off of each other, throwing out sketches and concepts on a whiteboard, just trying out new things for fun...it's an amazing feeling. Working with other people who are enthusiastic and open-minded makes creating cool things incredibly easy, and at university, if we ever ran into a continuity issue, I could resolve it very easily because of how used I am to resolving much bigger story issues.
With this focus of mine being largely on the storytelling side, it would make sense for my focus to be on becoming a concept artist or narrative writer. While this is indeed the case, I have to say there is also an incredible amount of satisfaction and excitement to be taken from receiving a piece of concept work and creating an actual 3D model of it. The actual realisation of an idea into existence is something that I treasure and a skill I greatly admire, due to the incredible friends I made at university and the hard work that I myself put into the games we made. This isn't even mentioning the incredible amount of storytelling one can do completely silently, through environments, models, and level design alone. The ability to do so is a skill I aim to hone, until my storytelling abilities cross the sensory boundaries and ensure that no-one is safe from my evil schemes.
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Thank you for taking the time to read all of this! I hope it's given you a bit more insight into me. As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, growing up closeted, autistic and with the classic British humility that borders on negative ego, I find that expressing and advertising myself can be weird and difficult, but here goes: I am actively looking for work, ideally anything concept or creative-writing based, but I am willing and able to adapt to whatever role is required of me. If you have read this far then hopefully my work is of interest to you, and I would be only happy to talk over social media, email, or whatever works.
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Now, I think it's time for a cuppa. Take care!