Marks and Spencer Christmas Overview Corporate.

Three solid days of on-line edit and After Effects work to turn around this job. I slept in the suite as AE rendered 12 hours through the Media 100 card, just to make sure I could restart the que when it crashed -  which it did frequently.  This is when I realised the sound AE makes on a failed job is that of a sarcastic sheep.

Oh and that bloody awful music did not help one bit. Still thats what happens when the director owns a music studio...

Action Man's 30th Anniversary celebration for Hasbro

This was a lot of fun, nostalgic job. Title created in Strata Studio 3D.

This was the age of MiniDV Sony DCR VX1000  camera, every budget corporate was shot on one, and 2 years before Apple introduced Final Cut Pro, Media 100 was at the top of its game. Capturing S-Video from the camera and mastering to Betacam. Seems mad now, but then it was the norm.

Jernas Missile systems  BAe Dynamics / MOD

This was a really unusual request -  I was contacted direct from a private company to make this video, not from the usual agency very hush hush. 

Jernas was the international export name for the Rapier Missile system developed since the 1970's. 

Spoiler alert, the missile hit you see 38s in is in fact a jump cut between two totally separate scenes.... Apparently they sold quite a few.

G'Day Summer Bay - Childrens ITV

This was my first terrestrial broadcast job. Yay. We figured out that in draft mode Media 100 only captured one field and scan doubled it giving the final picture a kind of filmic look - so we did the whole edit this way and effectively doubled our work capacity. ITV's compliance department didn't grumble so it was a double win.

Beautiful People - Not Necessarily  Stoned

Another quick turn around, about 4 hours, made somewhat distracting by the band watching the edit and enjoying some "herbal" cigarettes while I was cutting away.

I cannot remember a huge amount about this job, except for a lot of giggling and being extremely hungry every half an hour.

Crystal Clear Music Video

Jazzy funky sort of thing. I cannot remember who the artist is, but his initials are "RG". Labelling archives was not my strong point.

Again all shot on a Sony DCR VX1000, and a very relaxed edit.

Nice.

Mr Prawn - the commercial

Not quite the glitzy world of advertising I had hoped for,  but a job is a job and actually it was quite fun. The client was happy and I was way cheaper than the first agency he went to.

The amazing thing about this job is that all the creation files fitted on 1.44Mb floppy disc. I didn't have much of my own kit at the time so I had to render the job at the facility house, while we recorded the voice over. 

Punny Ident for CD Showreel.

CD-ROM Burners had just come out, I spent £750 on one of the first in order to back up work. In order to pay for it I made my first showreel as an interactive CD and sent it to various agencies. This was quite a novel approach for the time as the norm was VHS tapes.

So in a moment of pure genius I dubbed it CV-ROM. 

Geddit?

Compaq Presario User Guide

I did a lot of corporate work,  they all wanted intros but didn't want to pay a fortune for it.  So after a long day of editing, getting asked if they could have something "a bit flashy at the front"  was always a joy. 

After Effects has always been one of my favourite tools as it is so versatile, even at version 3. Coupled to a Media 100 was like having a Quantel Mirage on your desktop, ideal for this sort of thing.

OCÉ Printers Conference Launch

I was asked to come up with a conference opener at the last minute, a day before to be precise, so  I had to burn the midnight oil on my  little 40 MHz 16mb Power Computing Mac clone at home. I had to work at 320x240 resolution to preview the timing then save the creation files to floppy and render at the facility house again

It was this point I decided to buy my own edit suite, and by working a few favours for Media 100 managed to get a huge discount and I was up and running.

Shooting Wild Documentary for Discovery Channel

This was a behind the scenes film for  a documentary about Silverback Gorillas. I did the offline and online edit and title sequence. I had to sift through 10 hours of DV footage with the director, but thanks to Media 100 NLE we had the rough cut to master done in four days. 

VE Day Tribute - Imperial War Museum 

Led a 3 camera shoot of the event, offline and online editor and produced all the graphics and video inserts for the event. This  was a really interesting project as I got to work with archive footage from the museum. The most complicated part of the 3 day project was having to scan still images on my trusty Amiga 4000 and then transfer them to the PowerMac 8500 via floppy one image at the time. Took an eternity.

Bonus, got to meet Vera Lynn and the Andrew Sisters.

Woking Centenary Celebrations - Woking Borough Council

This was my first big solo project. I shot, edited,  designed the titles and video packaging as well as duplicating all 250 of the VHS copies on a 6 bay duplicator.  The council sold it as a memoir of the events of the day.

I think all the copies were sold to steam enthusiasts, cant imagine why...

This is when I discovered that if you want to get things done sometimes its better to do it yourself.

Touche Ross Budget Conference

I had to make this on budget day, the day before the conference,  Did the 3D bit in the while recording the Budget feed from the BBC, rushed out to get evening edition papers to scan headline and comp them in After Effects then finally edit a highlights video of the key points of the budget speech . After the edit had to render out the graphics on a slow PowerMac 8500 (6hours...) then output to tape and get it to the Venue ready for the conference in the morning.

Well at least I got alpha channels  working in LogoMotion...

Lombard Conference Ident

First ever attempt at 3D. Spinning metallic logo's were all the rage and it was now possible for £90 using LogoMotion and After Effects and Media 100. 

The trick was to render at twice the frame count then use After Effects to interpolate the timebase so it field rendered the final output for a super smooth spin.

Why have I included this? Well, why not? we all had to start somewhere.... and its shiny.