Jonathan Laramy

When I was a child, my parents took me to the York Castle Museum.

Inside there is a reconstructed Victorian street. Real shopfronts you can walk into. Waxworks of the tradesmen. The whole thing built at full scale so you are standing in it rather than looking at it.

I have thought about that street for most of my life.

I was the child who asked why until the adults ran out of answers. Days out to historic houses and castles, taking in the architecture, trying to work out what had actually happened there. I wanted to know what these places had genuinely been like. The noise. The smell. The people walking around with no idea they were living in history.

For a long time there was nowhere to put that.

I did what a lot of people do. Insurance, then marketing, then eight years in customer service. I was good at it and I did not hate it, but I always had ideas I could not execute. I could not code. I could not animate. I did not have the budget to learn. That felt like the end of the conversation.

Then the tools arrived.

Suddenly I could describe something in plain English and watch it appear. Everything I had been carrying around since that Victorian street in York had somewhere to go. I looked at what people were making with these tools and noticed that almost nobody was pointing them at history.

I started with Greek mythology, because of a strategy game I had played obsessively as a teenager. Then ancient civilisations. Then entire histories of cities, going back to the moment a place first existed and watching it grow.

Majestic Studios came out of that. So did Chloe, who has now reached more people than I can properly get my head around.

What I do has a lot in common with what any filmmaker does. Decide what the story is. Work out how to tell it. Choose what the audience sees and in what order, and get the details right so nobody has a reason to doubt you. The tools I use to build the images are new. The craft underneath is not.

The job is to make somebody feel what it was actually like to stand somewhere they will never get to stand.

I am still building that Victorian street. It is just considerably longer now.