When I arrived on my first day I was astonished to see numerous pornographic magazines casually littering the desks.
I'm not prudish by nature and it's not as if my time at art school was anything but an eye opener; I was all geared up ready to impress and thought I had it all figured out, but this truly threw my focus.
Sean who sat at the other end of the studio offered to move a couple of copies of Penthouse off my desk and as he was walking back to his desk, turned to me and said "Oh I suppose you're wondering what all the porn mags are about".
In the late '90s there were 5 or 6 main visualising studios in the West End and I suspect they all occasionally turned to soft core pornographic magazines to use as reference material in order to provide storyboards to the ever demanding advertising agencies.
Back then there were no online search engines available to the artists, all we had were clunky stock image annuals full of predictable staged photo shoots.
In contrast these magazines possessed all the raw ingredients to make for an engaging storyboard.
This was a world away from the years of life drawing classes I had taken whilst at art school.
Traditional drawing techniques had little relevance here and I could see now why many of my fellow art school crowd looked down on the advertising industry.
I wanted to enter this with an open mind though, and learn what I could.
All I saw was a group of artists doing whatever was necessary to achieve the desired effect in a short space of time, and that for me at the time felt like a good place to be.
Due to the large budgets involved, visualising studios have always competed heavily with each other to get the very lucrative storyboard work from the top agencies.
It's little wonder then, with so many adverts reliant upon the desirability of women, that these studios actively encouraged the artists to use pornographic magazines to ensure the best possible chance of success.
It got to the point that even if a storyboard featured a mundane scene of a mum in a kitchen bending over to put washing powder into a washing machine, out came the magazines.
It was inevitable that some of the provocative attitude of the model's pose would get filtered into the storyboard no matter how slight; this approach went down very well with the ad agencies.
So once one studio starting using these magazines, the rest followed in order to compete.
The fascinating thing for me as a storyboard artist is that, although I am an anonymous cog in the creative world of advertising, the models, gestures, poses and compositions I pick, although within the confines of the ad agencies brief, are mine and I can see them clearly in the final ad.
This is largely due to the astronomical cost of post-production; once a storyboard goes through the research stage and gets approved there is very little room for maneuver for the director shooting the final advert.
Today thankfully, Google has an infinite array of reference to draw inspiration from, making the process of producing inspiring work ever more easy.
The only negative effect I believe, that the internet's inexhaustible supply of images has had on the storyboarding industry, is that today a large majority of artists don't draw as such anymore, but simply trace over downloaded images which, believe it or not, is a time-consuming technique which also takes the emotion out of the work and produces a factory line generic effect.
This again is the changing face of the industry, however I believe a good grounding of solid drawing skills will always stand you in good stead, aided by a good balance of traditional and online reference material.