Personal
Tunisian brik with chermoula fish
Overdue on this one, which is daft as it was another delicious Spicery meal, courtesy of my FXHOME leaving present. None of the Spicery meals have been difficult exactly but they have all challenged me to new flavours and techniques, this month especially as it involved creating tuna parcels. (more…)
Personal
Indian Kathi rolls with mango & saffron kulfi
When I left FXHOME last month they gave me a year’s subscription to the Spicery as a parting gift. This is my first adventure in spicery recipes, which I’ll be blogging about each month. Theoretically, at least. It started like this: (more…)
Professional
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.
(more…)
Filmmaking
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:
Filmmaking
Feeling the chill: summoning the trolls
A recent video I produced and presented for the HitFilm channel was all about editing gaming videos. Pretty simple but useful stuff, presented in a nicely relaxed manner. Given the channel has a fairly diverse viewership, I wanted to have a brief overview that established the culture of online gaming videos for anybody unfamiliar with the concept. Here’s the finished video:
When scripting the episode I had a moment of weakness and it’s been irritating me ever since. (more…)
Professional
Copy thoughts: Keeping it fresh
I’m hoping to do occasional articles like this, looking analytically at both my own work and that of others.
Software dev FXHOME just released PhotoKey 7 Pro, the latest version in a long-running series of image editing products. I’m the lead copywriter at FXHOME and was responsible for writing the copy for the new website. It turned out to be a lot of fun. You can check out the results here. (more…)
Professional
Experiences of SXSW
I went to SXSW! This is exciting because it’s an event which has grown increasingly relevant and influential over the last decade, has spread into every corner of every news website I read, and this year…I was there.
FXHOME kindly flew me there and back, accompanied by my colleagues Kirstie, Josh and Andrea. In summary: Austin is wonderful. SXSW is weird and confused but mostly good. (more…)
Filmmaking
Kramer-style star
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…
Professional
How to run a successful Kickstarter
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…)