The Happygoth project originated with a University brief, and a fake fashion campaign to rebrand an existing 'look' to make it appeal more to a wider audience.

The original idea was inspired by a high-street advertising campaign being run at the time, and the project ran with the tag-line "Happy Goth- Cheerful is the new Moody". The idea was to show people dressed in traditional 'goth' outfits posing happily, contrasted with cheerful, colourful props and surroundings .

The original shoot was undertaken in the studio to test the concept, and a year later it was developed further (with a new model) to form the basis of a series of fake advertising posters to appear around the "Britannia Model Village" project. A final shoot occurred later to polish off some of the images that had been planned but left uncompleted from the early shoots, and to allow a new model to test some new techniques and shooting styles.