We couldn’t be more excited to have Jonathan Blessley joining our team as Managing Director! He starts with us on the 5th of January and I for one am over the moon. When I started The Finish Line in 2011 I had a very clear idea of what I wanted The Finish Line to be and imagined my dream team. Jonathan was always the person I had in mind for MD of the business, there was never an alternative.

This is the video for the 4th single and track 5 off Shapeshifter’s album DELTA. It was Directed by Nick Dwyer, Edited by Tu Neill, Graded by Zeb Chadfield and Shot by James Anderson, Warren Green, Dean Cornish & Clayton Carpinter for Like Rice.

I stumbled upon this today. It’s the showreel for Alex Kalymnios and it’s made up entirely of clips from the special five part late night 2012 series of Hollyoaks’ aptly named Hollyoaks Later. I was brought in by my buddies at Sequence Post to grade the series for Lime Pictures.

We have a creative review in the February 28th 2014 issue of Broadcast Magazine about out work on ‘Fonteyn ’59: Sleeping Beauty’ for the BBC.

So far this year at The Finish Line we have been hard at work Grading and doing Online’s for a bunch of new BBC and Discovery Channel shows. Any free time we’ve had has been spent visiting the various production companies we work with to help them get ready and start transitioning to file delivery. It’s been great fun and a good excuse for some good lunches out and about all over London.

I always find that editors complaining about how “terrible” FCPX is haven’t actually used the software, so their opinions are very misleading. It may come as a little bit of a surprise when I tell you that I actually love Final Cut Pro X.

I recently had the pleasure of doing the Online Editing for ‘Blackout’ Channel Four’s feature-length ‘What-If’ drama exploring the effects of a devastating cyber-attack on Britain’s national electricity grid. It’s an amazing combination of three purpose shot stories intertwined with user generated content (UGC) from various YouTube video makers and archive video. It takes place over the course of a week and throughout the filming process the contributors and actors use various cameras which all need to have a very web video type look. Footage from DSLR’s, mobile phones, security cameras, point ‘n’ shoot digital cameras, go-pros and consumer videocameras were used throughout to give it the right look and feel, only the quality has got so good with all of these different cameras that not much of it actually looked like web video, honestly a lot of the footage shot on iPhones looked better then footage from higher end cameras that I work with. So my main task in the Online for this was getting the right look for the programme and a subtle separation of each of the primary story’s cameras.

I have had a bit of back and forward with the DPP crew this week. I’m about to invest in some new kit and I just wanted some clarification on the Harding FPA/PSE section of the latest spec.

At the Broadcast Production and Post Forum I was chairman of the Meet the Colourist panel. I met with a couple of the panellists prior to the event and we had a great chat. One thing we had a good laugh at was the use of a blue wash as the look of night. I know it’s a really common method for creating a night look but I have always disliked it and apparently I’m not alone. I’m not sure if you have ever been awake at night and looked around but I’ll assume you have and if so, like me, you would have probably noticed that everything didn’t look blue.

My Dad was on the Round The Mountain episode of New Zealand TV programme This Town on Saturday the 26th of October.