It’s been an eventful few weeks – and I’m not even including Christmas in that!

Last night I was at Manchester Arena to see Snow Patrol in concert, and it was a really great gig. It was quite a last minute thing… I decided to look on Monday to see whether there were any tickets left, and I managed to get a seat on one of the sides, which meant I had to sit at a bit of an angle to see the stage!

They had two supports – the first was Roe, who I’d not heard of before, but the second was Kodaline, and I’ve got one of their albums so knew some of the songs they did.

Snow Patrol took to the stage around 9pm, and they played all the classics – ‘Take Back The City’, ‘Chocolate’, ‘Run’, ‘Open Your Eyes’, ‘You’re All I Have’, ‘Cars’ – and even the ones I couldn’t name still sounded familiar… with an encore ending with ‘Just Say Yes’.

Also, just before Christmas, I saw Travis play at the O2 Apollo, and because it’s almost 20 years years since it was released, they played the entire ‘The Man Who’ album from start to finish, followed by a selection of other tracks to wrap up the set.

They were really good, but it was also a bit scary to realise how old the songs are! I was annoyed by some of the crowd though. It was an all seated gig, and I was quite near the back, and quite a lot of the people around me weren’t taking that much notice of the performance, and were either back and forth from the bar, or just chatting. I don’t understand why you’d pay money to go to a gig, and then ignore the music!

Work-wise, it’s been an incredibly busy start to the year, with two different studio shoots within a week of each other.

The first was a musical piece for Brother, and we had to build an office set to allow us to shoot a variety of scenes by redressing it each time. I came up with a wall design that would work for the set-ups needed in the song, and managed to find a company that could construct all the wooden flats, and then build and paint it for us at short notice in in Studio 3 here at the Sharp Project, during the first week of the new year!

It was a bit tight, but everything came together in time! The star of the video is comedian Katie Mulgrew, who plays a put-upon office PA, and she had to record the song in a studio a few days before the shoot, then lipsync for each scene when on set.

We also had a group of other actors to play the roles of various office workers, and they did really well because it was a pretty long day, and there was quite a bit of waiting around. We shot it on an ARRI Alexa, and Chris Willan flew over from Barcelona as DoP, and he lit the set really evenly which helped sell the look of an office, albeit highly on brand!

Then, the following week, we were back in the same studio shooting a load of content for Swinton Insurance with TV presenter Vicki Butler-Henderson. It’s a series of videos about looking after your car, especially through the winter months, and we dressed the studio taking inspiration from shows like Top Gear, and I think it looked really cool! ELP came in and constructed a frame of stage truss for the featured car to be filmed in, and it was lit really nicely too. We had 2 main cameras, a camera on the One Man Crew slider, plus a massive 9 metre jib to give us some cool sweeping shots of the whole studio. We’re in the middle of editing all the videos now, and they should be going online very soon!