Guy Larsen
Sometimes you watch something and you find yourself watching it for a third time because you’re trying to figure out how it was made. That’s what happened when we watched the Adam Buxton’s ‘Pizza Time’ Visualiser. It looks like it’s handmade, but surely it’s not, it can’t be, that’s too much work! Then the algorithm did something unexpected, it showed us a video from Guy Larsen, the artist that made the visualiser, showing how they made the video. And you won’t believe it, it was handmade…
Written by Creative Stories
09/06/2025
Photos and Cover image by Joseph Lynn
It only made sense to reach out to Guy and find out more. Guy is a hard creative to try and explain because going on his website is like looking into a treasure chest of moving image, there’s a little bit of everything, so instead of us trying to explain what he does, we asked him how he describes what he does when people ask?
“I always get a twitch in my gut when I’m asked this, because I’ve never been able to nail my answer. I’ve landed for now on being a writer and multimedia director. The ‘multimedia’ bit does a lot of the heavy lifting there. I accept it’s a slightly wanky word. Maybe I’m a slightly wanky person.
For a long time I was frustrated at myself that I couldn’t find a lane. I felt like just as I got something going I kept starting again. I used to have a separate Instagram account for my artwork, but I ended up just straddling two accounts with work that could be on either. Social media used to soft-push people to have a neat grid full of that one thing you do like, “Oh you’re the person that does X!”. I’ve seen that become very limiting for a lot of creatives who - because of exactly this - constrict the risks they take with new styles and ideas incase their audience don’t like it.”
We think a lot of creatives will relate to this, especially when social media platforms want you to be consistent e.g. using the same five hashtags, so it knows who’s feed it should show you to.
“As it’s evolved, I think there’s been a shift towards authenticity. People accept that creative people have a lot of different interests that change all the time. Our lives are messy. It protects what we need which is to stay open-minded! I’m told my style runs through it all, even if I can’t see that. I’m learning to embrace that about myself more and trust my gut on it, even if it’s twitching.”
Guy is an awarding winning creative that works across film, TV and podcasts. Reading his ‘about’ page on his website is incredibly impressive. He describes his work as “playfully dark”, and when working across so many mediums and genres we wondered if there was one area he liked to work in more than others?
“Some ideas want to be told in a certain way. Others can be translated into different mediums. If you’re able to think in animation and live action and audio for example, I believe you have more options open to you. I had an idea for a supernatural TV show about a house fire and a boy that goes missing after it. I’m not a nepo baby and I knew if I wrote a spec script I’d spend ten years hawking it around with no luck. I was completely unproven in any industry. I believe you have to make the biggest and best story you can with the resources you have today, and build up from that. So I reimagined it as a marionette TV show idea - a dark THUNDERBIRDS. But even though that was cheaper, it was still an expensive idea. My partner falls asleep to true-crime podcasts all the time, and I realised that the story I was trying to tell was a true-crime story, just about a fictional event. If we were able to fuse the two together, like SERIAL meets TWIN PEAKS, I could tell a satisfying story in audio that had the feel of a cinematic, high-end Netflix TV show, at a fraction of the cost. I began writing it with Cambria Bailey-Jones, and our fiction series UP IN SMOKE blew out from that. We cast Mei Mac and Adam Buxton in it among many other talented actors, and we topped the podcast charts and received a Webby Award nomination. We’re now having conversations with people about TV adaptations of it that we wouldn’t have been able to have had we not thought laterally about how to get the story out there.”
Just in that answer you can see Guy is pulling inspiration from multiple places, so where does somebody that can think up a ‘supernatural Thunderbirds meets Twin Peaks through a cinematic podcast’ get their ideas from?
“Normally not from the same medium the final idea ends up being. If you’re a massive movie buff and your only source of reference is other movies, you’re only going to be able to create movies that are derivative composites of those. Unfortunately where we’re at with technology now, that way of generating ideas is under threat from ChatGPT. Where I have faith against AI is that ideas can be pulled from places that have no connection to the final product. You could never get a computer to do that, because it wouldn’t know what was a great connection and what was terrible. I have a list of ideas on my phone I can quickly jot down when I have one, and then I play the game of “If it’s good enough I’ll still be thinking about it in time”. I let the ideas sort themselves by quality after that.”
AI is a current trend and threat to creatives, but as Guy mentions the thing that separates us is knowing what ideas are good and bad. We still need people with creative opinions to know when an idea should be actioned, and then we need creative people to execute it.
Anyway, we're here to talk about the Adam Buxton’s Pizza Time Visualiser… As mentioned Guy and Adam worked together on ‘Up In Smoke’, “I was a little anxious to work with him as I’d quietly always been an Adam & Joe fan.” They had a good experience working together and they “stayed in touch and then a year later he asked if I’d be interested in animating one of his tracks on his new album.”
They knew they wanted to do something with stop motion as Adam had liked Guy’s previous music videos ‘Cavetown’ and ‘Orla Gartland’. “I pitched the idea of something kaleidoscopic using pizza elements, which immediately leaned towards paper.”
If you haven’t seen the behind the scenes videos Guy posts on his social media, we highly recommend you go watch them. The Visualiser is just over a minute long, which might not seem a lot, but if you measured that time in faces… “At 12 frames per second, that’s over 800 faces I had to print, cut out and animate without a single frame getting out of order. If a breeze blew them off the table, it would have been days of work just reorganising them.”
That’s a lot of Adam Buxton faces, you might be wondering how Guy kept himself focused,
“I made sure I could think about how to capture behind-the-scenes video of it and line up lots of podcasts and music to listen to. I did actually begin with listening to Adam’s interview with Richard Ayoade, but with the faces too it felt a bit… weird. So I listened to Fat Dog’s album on repeat and used the energy to spur me on. I also listened to the whole of ‘The Anthropocene Reviewed’ by John Green, which I actually cried to at one point so I had to take a quick break. That man can write about humanity like few others can. If I’m writing though, it’s either silence or very ambient cinema scores or classical. Absolutely nothing with lyrics.”
The song is very catchy and for all it’s silliness it’s also melancholy and warmth, which really suits Guy’s style. It’s a great video and possibly one of the most creative things we’ve seen in a while.
Guy is working on series two of ‘Up In Smoke’, “which would be a fresh new story about a missing person and a supernatural twist.” Guy says that the dream project would be “an adaptation of one of our fiction podcast series to TV or book, I’d be so happy with that. If I could sneak in some stop motion in that, even better, but I won’t push my luck.”
Big thanks to Guy for taking the time to chat to us and be sure to follow him on all the usually social platforms.