Post – Princess Post Production Client – Shine TV Brief – Create a cinematic grade for the ‘Real-life Thriller’ Hunted

I have been working on this since I first opened The Finish Line. Being able to finally announce it has me really excited because the technology has finally caught up with a dream I have had for a long time. As the name suggests The Finish Line : Central is a central location where numerous technical offerings from The Finish Line come together. It may sound a little cryptic but at this point we have just covered a few areas that we felt were in urgent need of improvement and we have loads more on the to do list. This is about where we’re at with the technology right now.

Post Production burn out is well known, Zack Arnold wrote about his experiences recently in this article. Reading that felt almost like I was reading my own story. Back in 2011 I had a massive nervous breakdown. It was awful and something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemies. I’ve got a bunch of half written posts about that part of my life which I’ll post eventually but this is more about something that has helped me to cope, which I wanted to get out to potentially help others.

Robert Rodriguez has been a massive inspiration of mine since watching El mariachi in the early 90s and learning about how he made it for $7000 and went on to win at Sundance. This episode of The Tim Ferriss show is a great listen and covers a lot of why I think he is someone everyone needs to take a tip or two from. I had the pleasure of meeting him at IBC in 2014 which was great. Very hard not to be a massive fan boy but I got through it. If you haven’t read Rebel Without a Crew you should but at least listen to this show.

Well as much as I would like to completely lose them and just have a credit to say “For a list of cast and crew that worked on this programme go to ‘production company URL’.”, this is not about the complete end of end credits as much as the end of the common roller at least. Got to start somewhere.

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.