Tag / Work

by Gareth

Music and videogames

Bit of a catch-up…

Had a few good nights out over the last few months. Back in February I got to see Rend Collective play at the O2 Ritz in Manchester.

Rend Collective.

I actually thought I’d left a decent amount of time to get to the show. I’d not been to the Ritz before, so was quite surprised to see the queue to get in going from Whitworth Street, right round onto Oxford Road, stretching back quite a way. I originally thought it was a queue for Hamilton over the road at the Palace, but soon discovered it was the queue I needed to be in so joined the back of it. The staff were really slow getting people in, and it took ages to make my way down to the entrance. The support act was just starting as I arrived, so I moved towards the stage to get a good position.

Rend Collective.

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by Gareth

Tony Butler

Really sad to hear earlier today of the death of Midlands broadcasting legend (and that title’s not an exaggeration!) Tony Butler. Growing up in the region, he was a TV and radio presenter who was known by everyone, and I got to work with him for probably about 18 months back in the late 90s. It was right at the start of my career, in my first job working at local cable TV station Birmingham Live.

Tony Butler at Birmingham Live TV in 1999.

He certainly was a larger-than-life character, and very much had his own way of doing things, but I really enjoyed getting to work with him making low budget TV! I did quite a lot of shoots with him at various sports venues, and so many random people would come up and talk to him, and he just seemed to know everyone!

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by Gareth

Unwanted birthday

So it was my birthday last week, and I hit a milestone which wasn’t particularly wanted! For my 40th, I travelled to America and spent my actual birthday in New York which was pretty cool, but for my 50th I didn’t really want to do anything to celebrate! Anyway, back to that in a minute!

Mum came up to stay for a few days on Tuesday, with the main idea to clear out the planter in my back garden and put some new plants in there. We hit a slight issue quite early on due to the fact that the plant that was already in there didn’t want to come out! I was given a couple of pot plants as a birthday present about 9 or 10 years ago, and I stuck them outside in the planter because I didn’t have anywhere in the house to put them at the time, but since then, they’d exploded from their pots and grown to a ridiculous size!

So it actually took quite a few days to hack away at it, and once we’d removed most of the leaves, found that it had become a massive stump that had roots that had spread throughout all of the soil! It was really difficult to get out because it was so big and heavy, and also because of the space it was in made it really difficult to manoeuvre.

Mum tackling the overgrown plant!

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by Gareth

Wimbledon and the West End

Just got back from a really great week filming down in London. I was staying down there for seven days working at Wimbledon for the ‘Play Your Way To Wimbledon’ tournament, producing social content each day for ESPN. Ahead of the week, I’d done a few filming days profiling three of the players, so had already had a chance to work with some of the crew – Ged who was producing all the content (and who I’ve been aware of for years through mutual friends, but never worked with before), and another cameraman called Billy who’s based in the midlands and mostly does stuff for Sky Sports.

Filming at Wimbledon.

Me, Billy and another cameraman called Tony spent the days filming lots of the tennis matches, as well as shooting extra features with former tennis pro Laura Robson, who was with us to present each day’s social video. I felt a bit sorry for the editor Alex who had to deliver the final video at the end of each day, because we were constantly supplying him with more and more footage as he was trying to compile that day’s edit! I was kind of happy that I was filming rather than editing on this project!

Tony, Ged, Laura, Liam, Saff and me in Wimbledon’s Centre Court.

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by Gareth

Finally got my workspace sorted

So my office space / guest room is now pretty much finished! I put down some laminate flooring last weekend, and I’d bought the sofa bed a few months ago, and it’s been stored downstairs in its box until Lee popped over last Tuesday morning to help me get it up the stairs and into the room. I’ve still got to put some trim down where the flooring meets the skirting boards, plus get some shelves to put into one of the alcoves to store my camera kit.

My office / guest room.

Office work area.

The main impetus that got me to finish the room is that mum came up to visit last week – her first time since Covid – and I wanted to make sure she had somewhere decent to sleep! She came up to stay for a few days at the end of 2019, but that time I had to put a dust sheet down over a really trashed carpet, along with a blow-up bed that had a very slow puncture!

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by Gareth

Linda O’Brien

Roger and Linda.

I posted this on social media, but I thought I’d put it on here as well because it has really saddened me.

My first job in tv and production was way back at the end of 1997 when I was taken on at the cable channel Birmingham Live TV, and it really was a great learning experience and I got to work alongside a really good team. Well, last night I got a message from Phil who I used to work with to tell me the really sad news that one of the reporters from there, Linda O’Brien, had just passed away after an on-going illness. She was genuinely one of the nicest people in the business, and I got to spend a lot of time with her back then both on shoots and also crammed into our tiny edit suite editing on NewsCutter. One of the things I remember about Linda is that she could actually edit a bit herself (unusual for a reporter back then), so had this habit of leaning over and grabbing the mouse if she suddenly had an idea to make an edit better! It was a bit frustrating at first, but I soon got used to it, and she always acknowledged that it could be annoying… although she was often right with the changes she made.

Linda, Ashley and Karen.

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by Gareth

Bob

So it’s fair to say the pandemic has completely trashed my efforts to try and get back into work this year, with any jobs I had lined up cancelled. So when I was asked to help out with a short comedy drama to be produced in lockdown, I jumped at the chance!

A stand-up comic friend of mine is also an award-winning writer, and she’s penned a short script about a family getting to meet a new baby for the first time over a video call.

Katie, Daniel, Eithne and Emily rehearsing ‘Bob’.

It involved 4 actors (and a baby!), so I needed to find the best way to record and edit it. I’ve not really used Zoom at all, other than for Emma’s wedding back in April, so did a bit of research, and originally I was planning to get them to record the footage locally on their phone cameras, just using the video conferencing to be able to hear each other.

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by Gareth

Work situation

I’ve not really written too much about this publicly, but this year has been a major upheaval for me work-wise. Back in February, some stuff came to a head which then led to me leaving the company I’d co-run for the last 12 years, and it was the most painful thing ever. It’d never even crossed my mind that I wouldn’t ever not be part of the business – I’d always thought I’d be there until the day I stopped working.

Technically, I left at the end of March, but was last working in the office in February, and that was the last time I saw any of the people I worked with. It’s now been nearly 6 months since I last really did any paid work for anyone.

I’ve wanted to work in production since I was kid – I was obsessed by TV and how it’s made (I used to make TV studios out of Lego!), and even when I was at school spent a ridiculous amount of my free time filming and editing videos. When I was about 13, I even got to visit BBC Pebble Mill in Birmingham, and explore the various studios and galleries which was amazing, and just reinforced that it was what I wanted to spend my life doing.

So to then be doing the work I’d always dreamt of – I was always aware how lucky I was to do a job I was passionate about. Even though there would be bad days, and I’d sometimes work some ridiculous hours, there was always that reminder that so many people had to go to a job each day that they absolutely hated.

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by Gareth

Gigs plus studio shoots

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.

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.

Travis.

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by Gareth

Holiday in Ireland

A couple of weeks ago I was on holiday in Ireland again, meeting up with mum and my niece and nephew. They’d already been there for a few days, and I set off really early on a Sunday morning to make a 9am sailing from Holyhead to Dublin, followed by a 3½ hour drive across the country to Mai & PJ’s house just outside Listowel.

The following morning – we took my mum’s hire car back to Shannon airport, with me following behind, so we could then carry on in just the one car.

We carried on northwards for a bit, before making a brief stop in County Clare’s main town, Ennis, and then carried on to the north west of the county, finally arriving at the Cliffs of Moher.

Cliffs of Moher.

They’re really stunning, and you can really sense the power of the sea crashing onto the rock a couple of hundred metres below. It was really windy, and it had been quite drizzly all morning, but it did dry up for us whilst there. It was a pretty strenuous walk up a load of steps to an old round tower overlooking the sea, and we carried on walking along the cliff top until we got to a little hut selling ice lollies (which of course we partook in!).

It was crazy seeing the amount of people who’d left the path to position themselves really precariously on the cliff edge to take a selfie – I’m not sure any photo, no matter how stunning, is worth potential death!

Afterwards we went into the visitor centre, which seems to be a giant cave inside the hill, and there were quite a few interactive things which Brandon & Chloe could have a go at. Even mum decided to try out the greenscreen selfie area, although the camera they use is really low quality and the keying wasn’t that great!

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by Gareth

Scotland weekend

Last weekend I was up in Scotland with Ali for Steve & Tatiana’s wedding! The wedding was on the Friday, so I drove up on Thursday afternoon and then picked up Ali from the airport, who’d taken a flight from Bristol. However, as I was driving to the airport, I got a major warning light and message on my car saying ‘system fault’ which wasn’t ideal!

I get RAC membership with my car servicing, so called them up early evening, and an RAC man finally arrived quite late, and determined it was probably an issue with my battery not fully holding its charge and causing the error message. He reckoned it would be safe to drive over the weekend but that I’d need to arrange to get it checked soon at a Nissan garage.

Anyway, next day was the day of the wedding – I’d offered to live stream it for them, since a lot of Tatiana’s family weren’t able to make it over to the UK. We had breakfast and left first thing so that I’d have time to set up kit. I was only using a single camera with a BlackMagic Web Presenter plugged into my laptop. In hindsight, I wish I’d packed a 2nd camera to plug into it, but I think they were happy that there was any kind of broadcast!

You can still watch the live stream of the service on YouTube.

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by Gareth

A catch-up

I thought I’d do a bit of a catch-up of what’s been going on the last few weeks.

At the start of last month, we had a bit of a crazy weekend shooting a TV commercial for Transform, which involved a mix of interior and exterior locations. We were really banking on the weather being good, and we were so lucky that the rain didn’t materialise until Sunday afternoon, because by then we’d filmed all of the outside stuff. We shot it all on the FS5 mounted on a Ronin stabiliser, and the shots looked great.

The week the shoot saw us having to get it edited and through Clearcast clearance to allow it to be shown on TV, and it was pretty tight, but we managed to get it on air without too much trouble!

Then, a couple of weeks ago, I went to the Lowry to see ‘The Elis James and John Robins Experience’ – I started listening to their Radio X show and podcast back in September, and I heard them mention that they were doing a tour, so checked online and saw that there were just a few tickets left for the show! It was really funny – there were some references that I didn’t get that obviously would be known to a long time listener, but it just made me want to check out more of their back catalogue!

Elis James & John Robins.

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by Gareth

The Edges Of These Isles


Last week saw the the culmination of a project between Simon Bray and Tom Musgrove with an exhibition at the Whitworth Gallery, and as part of the night, a short film documenting the process was shown to a packed out room.

The idea behind the project was to look at how a photographer and artist saw various UK locations differently, and me and James had travelled with them to Lindesfarne back in August 2014 to film them both, and then earlier this year I went with them to Northern Ireland to get footage of them at the Causeway Coast, and then I also filmed them back in Manchester to get extra material to use alongside some stills and footage they’d taken themselves at some of the other locations.

I was really pleased with how the final documentary came out – I think it tells the story really well, and it got a really good response on the night. The completed film (which includes footage from the Whitworth exhibition) is now up on YouTube, and you can watch it here:

by Gareth

Filming on the Causeway Coast

I’ve got a couple of mates who are in the middle of a long-term art project called ‘The Edges of These Isles‘, where they’re looking at the differences in how an artist and a photographer capture the same location – and back in August 2014, me and James filmed them visiting Lindisfarne, and you can see that video here.

Well, we’re looking to produce a short film to tell the story of the whole of Tom and Simon’s project as they travel the UK, using some video stuff they’ve shot, along with footage that we’re able to get at certain points.

So we found out they were going to be travelling to Northern Ireland to visit the Causeway coast, so it was organised for me to go with them to film what they got up to! I had to travel really light, because the best flight Simon could find only had a really small bag size for hand luggage, with a weight allowance of 10kg, which would include both my clothes and all the kit I needed! Small items could be stuck in my pockets, but unfortunately I wouldn’t able to take any kind of camera support, or the Canon 70-200mm lens since it’s pretty heavy!

Tom and Simon.

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by Gareth

Malta with Annie Mac!

Me, Annie Mac and James.

The last week has been a really busy one, producing a video trailer for next year’s Lost & Found festival in Malta, hosted by Radio 1’s Annie Mac. The job came in pretty last minute, and with very little time for planning, last weekend me and James were on a plane leaving Manchester at 6.30am, heading to Malta! We met up at the airport in Malta with Oli from The Warehouse Project, and Wilf who’s a Manchester-based promoter who I think runs and produces a lot of the stuff for the festival.

Oli and Will were staying in a hotel in Sliema, whereas we carried on in the taxi for about another 40 minutes to Bugibba, where we checked into the Topaz Hotel. What with it being early afternoon, it was now incredibly hot, and since we had to wait for our room, we ended up sitting in the shade by the pool, eating ice lollies for lunch!
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