James renders skin with a level of detail that makes it not only seem like you can reach out and touch it but you actually experience the sensation of what it feels like. It wasn’t just realism that Saatchi & Saatchi Healthcare needed to deliver for their client, they needed James’s passion to provoke a visceral reaction in his audience. It was this passion that helped Saatchi make people travelling consider what parasites might be lurking in their drinks.

We asked James what he found enjoying and challenging about the brief.

“Creating the creatures for Vivaxim was a lot of fun… I was given plenty of creative freedom and it was great to work with the photographer closely to pull everything together.

What was most fun about the job though was also its greatest challenge as the creatures had to fit seamlessly into the photographic environments that they were going to inhabit, so working from test shots and my initial sketches I began to create the models and prepare preview renders. From there I began texturing them – which is always one of the most fun parts of the job for me as it’s where they really start to come to life – before starting to integrate them into the photography. I took a lot of inspiration from the types of creatures you might find lurking at the bottom of the ocean, with their anaemic skin and razor sharp teeth and it was great to see them progress from model to fully fleshed out creature.”