I’m leaving FXHOME: here’s why

After 14 years, I’m leaving FXHOME at the end of this month.

14 is not an insubstantial number of years. One of my colleagues was 10 years old when I started working there. Back then, the Internet (and thus, the world) was very different. No Facebook. No YouTube. Google was still just a search engine. The iPhone hadn’t been invented. George W Bush and Tony Blair were getting ready to carve up the world. Nobody had seen the battle for Helms Deep. Half Life 2 was still two years away, as was Steam.

Anyway.
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Writing chapter 46: Wing

A structural oddity of A Day of Faces is that there’s rarely an evident antagonist, let alone an obvious Bad Guy. Holt fulfils that role for a while, but otherwise there’s only a general sense of insurmountable, conspiratorial forces. It’s rare for Kay & co to actually run up against them.

On the one hand, this runs into the Lord of the Rings ‘issue’ of there being no meaty Big Bad. Hence why the movies kept adding in Hero Orcs that the audience could properly dislike, while Sauron continued to be a vague background threat. (more…)

Heads Up: Riffing on Iron Man

Something I don’t think I’ve blogged about is my recent work at FXHOME on a Marvel-inspired campaign called Heads Up, designed to launch the new HitFilm 4 Express product. I ended up writing and editing a ton of videos, which have already nabbed over 204,000 views. A truly mind-bending stat.

Here’s the main sketch that everything hangs off:

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Beyond Good & Evil: First 5 Minutes

I’m attempting to make a bit more of my YouTube channel. Due to my intensive work on the HitFilm channel over the years I’ve not always found the time to focus on my own – there’s only so much YouTube you can fit into one life. Now that my HitFilm […]

Fierce Light & Dan Carlin: returning to WW1

Through most of 2015 I was listening to an enormously long audio documentary series about World War 1. It’s called Blueprint For Armageddon and is part of the Hardcore History show hosted by Dan Carlin. It has a very rambunctious intro, which might make you think that it’s going to be frilly and overblown. Don’t be put off – the show itself is nothing like its intro.

What you get is a six episode series, with each episode being about four hours long, in the form of a free podcast.

I’ll just let that sink in for a moment. We’re talking 24 hours of audio documentary. That doesn’t come around often. (more…)

Dishonored: First 5 Minutes

When writing about Dishonored, should one go with the official spelling of the title, or correct it to Dishonoured? And what happens when you’ve stared at both words for far too long, with the consequence that they both look entirely made up? An alternative is to make a video instead, […]

Writing chapter 45: Limbic system

This is the chapter in which Furey finally takes the gloves off. She’s been a controlled, simmering background player for the most part, with only occasional, brief moments of actual action – most notably at the end of Arc 3 on Hong Kong’s Peak.

‘Limbic system’, while still from Kay’s perspective, is essentially a Furey chapter. This is where she shows her quality, and demonstrates why she’s good to have along. That we see the action from the point of view of two people who are from a very different world (literally and figuratively, I suppose) makes it all the more entertaining, I hope – Kay’s experience of watching Furey at work is much like ours. (more…)