A couple of weeks back I attended a communications workshop run by John Bates. He’s very American. It was probably the best 5 hours I’ve spent in my entire professional career as a writer. I really wasn’t expecting it to be quite so revelatory, packed full of valid advice for Read more…
My 21-month old son appears to be taking after me, as he’s entirely obsessed with ‘rockets’. I heartily approve. I’m currently playing with three rocket-related projects. First up, there’s Millennium Surfing, my first novelette (too big for a short story, too short for a novella). It’s about lots of things Read more…
An occasional hobby is taking Andrew Kramer’s fantastic tutorials for After Effects and transposing them into HitFilm, to see how close I can get ’em. Most of the time it works out pretty damn well. So, his latest tutorial is a beautiful star close-up, and this is my own version, Read more…
Back in May I put together the HitFilm for Mac Kickstarter campaign for FXhome. We were asking for £25,000 and ended up with £58,126. Which was nice.
I thought it might be interesting to take a look at how we approached the campaign. Hopefully this post will be useful to any of you looking to run your own Kickstarter. (more…)
I’ve got my detailed breakdown of the HitFilm for Mac Kickstarter (and how we did it) coming up soon but in the meantime wanted to mention a couple of other campaigns: Ren I’ve worked with Kate Madison on numerous projects over the years, from Arms Race Escalation all the way Read more…
This is one of the more interesting projects I’ve worked on at FXhome. Our visual effects and video editing software HitFilm has been out on PC for a couple of years now and we’ve been asked continually about the possibility of a Mac version. For various reasons that wasn’t a Read more…
When I say ‘render farm’, I do of course mean my one and only computer. So while it valiantly chugs through the rendering of VFX shots for Arms Race I’m left unable to use it for much else.
So, here I am on my S3 finding out just how painful it is to type a blog post on my mobile phone. As it turns out, the combination of the S3’s absurdly massive screen and the stunning SwiftKey keyboard makes it rather pleasant and easy. This is the first time typing on a portable device hasn’t irritated me. It’s almost productive! (more…)
I attended a local Norwich networking event for media/marketing types this evening called Hot Source. I’ve been attempting to go for about 6 months, ever since Ryan from Lambda Films told me about it but have always been pre-empted by other circumstances. And so the last Thursday of May rolled Read more…
I forgot to post this a few weeks back when it first went up. It’s an extended, very detailed director’s commentary and VFX breakdown of the short film Extraction Protocol, which I directed for FXhome. If VFX and low budget filmmaking are your thing, it’s worth a watch: There’s also Read more…
My new short film is now online for all to see. I hope you enjoy it – let me know if you’ve got any feedback. MAJOR thanks to everybody that worked on the film, you’re all spiffy, and of course to FXhome for giving me the opportunity in the first Read more…