The following is taken from Animation World Magazine where he reflects on his work with Terry Brain and Charlie Mills.
Steve reckons that he got his first job in animation "by pure fluke." When he was still at school, and drawing all the time, his dad saw an incongruous ad in the local paper saying 'Cartoonists Wanted.'

"I phoned it up," says Steve, "and it just happened to be two roads away from where I lived." This was CMTB Animation, a two man company, who at the time were making low budget cut-out films illustrating ways to start a business. Steve met one of them, Terry Brain, and although he didn't get the drawing job, he noticed that they had a plasticine model sitting in the studio. He found out that they were hoping to make a stop-motion kids' series, and began to pester them. When they finally started work on a pilot episode, they were keen to let him be involved, but had no money for an extra animator. Steve managed to create a Government Youth Training Scheme placement for himself, which paid him £20 (about US$30) per week. He began animating on the first of what would be forty-five episodes of Trapdoor, a roughly made but original series remembered fondly by many British animators, which involved various plasticine monsters that escaped from a trap door each week.

"I was thrown in at the deep end, totally. They'd done animation at home as kids, and I'd never had that benefit because I'd never had a camera. So I learned by doing it, really. And that was blind animation, you know, not like what happens now."

I asked Steve whether he thinks it's better to learn to animate blind, before working with a video picture that one can see:

"Yes, without a doubt I do. I know it isn't easy now, because people tend to get jobs as animators on higher profile projects, and they have to use video assist, and they learn that way now. But I think the emphasis, even though you want it to be on performance, it's turned into a job of technical slickness. OK, [blind animation] is more ropey, it jumps about, if you kick the camera or knock the model over, you've got to start again or put up with it. Trapdoor is full of lumps and bumps, but what got better and better as we did it was the performance. And even though it's dead simple, characters started to come to life. Because the only way you can animate blind is by acting it in your head. Then I began to realise that just where you put that model, how many frames you hold something, how long he looks in a certain direction, how quickly he turns his head, gives him a unique character. There were three main characters -- they had different ways of behaving -- it wasn't analysed, it was just, they performed it, and we acted it. That's how I learned and that's what I value. I think animators should be made to learn that way, then they will understand the value of what they are doing. It's nothing to do with slickness. Slickness isn't important."

It amazing to think that he went from Thing Doer on The Trap Door to co-director of a big budget film such as Wallace & Gromit: The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit.