Biography

Childhood performing included a professional magic act at the age of 8 and a puppet show that ended in a pie fight at aged 9! After becoming fascinated by The Muppet Show, he knew that was the future for puppetry. He first met Jim Henson and his puppeteers as a fan in 1977, later visiting the set of The Muppet Show bringing along home made Muppet style puppets on a regular basis and learning and receiving much encouragement.

Upon leaving school he directly landed his first job as a Muppeteer in 1980 on The Great Muppet Caper filling in on crowd scenes and doubling up for main characters. This directly led to building Podlings and Slaves for The Dark Crystal and then actually performing the Slavemaster Skeksis for the film.

Many Muppet and creature film and television projects followed including the noteworthy character Nien Nunb on Return of the Jedi and assisting Frank Oz with the evergreen lovable Yoda.

Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, whilst continuing with his puppeteering career, he joined forces with fellow puppet master David Barclay to create Ultimate Animates, a production company created to experiment and develop new building and performing techniques for many of their own internal as well as external puppet productions.

A natural progression for Mike was to explore the use of computer graphic technologies to assist and to open up the performing and acting possibilities for his characters. By early 1997 he moved to San Francisco to become a character animator for Pixar after being impressed by their character work. Although he animated on A Bugs Life, his finest moment at Pixar was most definitely developing and animating on the 1950s style TV puppet show Woodys Round Up on Toy Story 2.

His desire to go full circle took him next to George Lucas’ ILM, first animating the famed dinosaurs in Jurassic Park 3, then moving on to animate on Yoda along with many other creatures in Attack of the Clones.

Now fresh from his time as an animator, he looks forward to combining all his knowledge and experience for use in future film and TV projects. He will also be pursuing character voice over work, acting and development on his own independent productions.