Phil Smith was born in November of '76 and grew up in the Woronora Valley, Sydney, Australia. As there was no road access, you had to either drive your boat or 'tinnie' to your home, or wander along the riverside bushland on a worn 'goat track'. Because of this, Phil had an extremely imaginative childhood, running wild through the bush and swimming in the river. Every afternoon and weekend Phil and his mates would be constructing cubbies, camping, canoeing, free-boarding or building BMX bike tracks!

In 1991, at the age of fifteen, Phil produced his first film. Called 'Woronora: Place of Hiding', it told the story of a small group of kids who had been camping in a valley during the outbreak of nuclear war. The valley was untouched, but the bomb had turned the population into mindless zombie like beings -and had awoken the slumbering creatures of the dreamtime. Life imitated art when a bunch of army cadets heard about the shoot, and terrorised the team each night, making filming very difficult.

Although problematic, the experience fuelled Phil's imagination and he continued experimenting and making short films and animations, and in 1994 he made two films for his Higher School Certificate. One for Visual Art called 'Inner Orbit' which was a dreamlike film portraying the circular world of a comatose patient, and the other called 'Recorded Over', a dark drama about a youth suffering depression, and eventually committing suicide, captured in a diary like fashion on his video camera. Both films were well received with 'Inner Orbit' accepted into the Art Express Exhibition (the best works from New South Wales) and 'Recorded Over' taken to Adelaide for a drama teachers conference and later used as a case study.

Based on his filmmaking and cartooning work, Phil was accepted into the University of Western Sydney's School of Design, as this was the only school at the time which had an animation strand. Between 1994 and 1998 Phil specialised in Graphic Design, Multimedia and Animation. In 1997 he teamed up with three other students to collaborate on a fifteen minute short film called SIVE. The film took two years to complete, and won the Most Creative Use Of Technology Award. SIVE (Self Imposed Virtual Environment) was the story of an individuals discovery that his percieved reality is in fact a computer generated one. 3D animation was used for the computer world, and stop-motion puppet animation for reality. The film was finished four months prior to the release of the matrix, however the similarities made for limited festival screenings.

Phil was then asked to create a design studio for a startup company called Virtual Expo International. Financed by leaders in the exhibition trade, VEI Studio designed multimedia content which traveled to various international exhibitions. Phil's role was to co-ordinate the design and technology behind this system and to accompany it to shows all over the world. The studio also did various print, CD-Rom, Web and video work. Phil remained creative Director until the end of 2002, when he applied and was accepted into the Australian Film Television and Radio school (AFTRS).

During his time at AFTRS Phil studied in the Digital Media Department. While there he was lead environment artist on Peter Sved's Crawlspace on which he modeled and textured much of the surrealist world. He also did titles design and some Visual Effects work on Beth Armstrong's Tackle, as well as assisting on Sejong Park's oscar nominated Birthday Boy. Phil also wrote and directed Crooked Mick of the Speewah, an absurdist storybook film, which had over 100 visual effects shots which Phil supervised and created with his extraordinary team. The film was awarded the SMPTE award for most creative use of technology by a team.

Since finishing Crooked Mick in June of 2005, Phil has worked with Oscar nominated director Steve Pasvolski on a fully 3D animated, Jim Beam TVC which Phil was responsible for all modeling, animation and compositing work. He has also been accompanying Crooked Mick to various festivals and developing future projects with his collaborators.