At The Finish Line we pride ourselves on coming up with creative solutions to various problems that our clients come to us with. The Finish Line : Live is the product of one of these challenges. We have clients all around the world in countries such as the UK, US, Australia and New Zealand and it is a very common for us to send files via FTP, WeTransfer or Moxion for client review. These systems are great and a very effective way of delivering viewing copies to clients but they have one fundamental issue – the delay in receiving client feedback. It is not uncommon to end up in a seemingly continuous loop of sending files, receiving notes, tweaking shots, sending files – repeat… The Finish Line : Live removes the need for this! We can have a live and secure feed, up and running at any time, for any length of time, for an unlimited amount of viewers, instantly! This means we can establish a live session with a client based anywhere in the world which will allow them to review and make changes in real time, as if they were in the room with us. They can view a live feed all day […]

I like to send out little emails to our team from time to time with tips on how I like to approach work/life/learning/tips/tricks… basically anything I find helpful that I think will help others. I’ve debated for a while what should be shared internally and what should be shared externally, ultimately I’ve decided (you will hear more on this later) that sharing is caring and if anything I have to share could help anyone then I should make it public. This is one such post. For me there have been a few specific things that have contributed to our success thus far and after reading Ed Catmull’s book Creativity, Inc I realised that a bunch of them are things that I have always done that have had major benefits for getting the most out of my time, work and most importantly, helping me to constantly improve, I thought I should share these tips.

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.