AS WE arrived at Mick Morris’s office in Oxford he warned me: “There’s something weird going on”.

Against a background of bloodcurdling screams and sounds of someone being walloped hard he led us into a huge studio.

There an actor in a skin-tight catsuit was leaping around in a cage, thumping a body bag while being filmed by more than 60 infra-red cameras.

“He will be getting shot and killed later,” he added casually.

Fortunately this was no real murder but a typical day at work for Mr Morris, managing director of motion capture specialists Audiomotion Studios, in Osney Mead.

The technical wizardry of his 12-strong team has helped create animation and special effects for top movies such as World War Z, Gladiator, The Golden Compass and Prince Caspian.

Much of their work is for video games, including best-sellers Formula 1, Killzone and Harry Potter.

And remember the scene in the Lynx TV adverts where the hero sprays aftershave on himself and then is mobbed by hundreds of lusting beauties?

Those crowd scenes were courtesy of Audiomotion, along with Robbie Williams’s Rock DJ skeleton video, where he takes first his clothes, then his skin off.

Mr Morris’s career break came in the mid-1990s, after landing a job as a video editor with a company called Just Results.

Before that he graduated in electronics imaging and media communications at the University of Bradford.Now 39, he said his interest in film and video editing started early.

He said: “I was always into messing around with cameras and shooting various projects.

“My first break came because the video editor at Just Results was going on maternity leave, so they gave me a shot.

“They specialised in corporate and medical videos and some of the stuff was pretty dull.

“But it has all served me well, in that there’s a certain language and terminology around that craft and post-production in general.”

Shortly afterwards, he was hired as a video editor by Audiomotion, then based in Banbury.

Five years later he and two colleagues bought out the company and relocated to Oxford.

As managing director Mick’s job is to find new business and keep existing clients happy. The job involves working closely with clients, often creative directors of video games companies.

“A video editor will sit with a client for hours, as they are the ones with the creative vision.

“They keep in mind what the creative brief is and what the director is trying to achieve. What we don’t want is, two weeks after the session, to have to tell them ‘we can’t deliver that shot’.”