Tag / Work

by Gareth

Day in Northern Ireland

This week, I was over in Northern Ireland for work – I’d never been to the north before… I went to County Kerry on the west coast of Ireland a couple of times as a kid, but that was about 35 years ago!

We needed to shoot a customer testimonial for a client, and it needed to be done at a showroom in Belfast, so I went over there with Andy Fidler on Thursday.

Because we were flying, we weren’t able to take much kit with us – I needed 2 cameras for the interview, but we didn’t have any economical way of taking a couple of tripods with us, so I had to try and find somewhere to hire from. Obviously, in Manchester it’s pretty easy to find a hire company for pro kit, but I really couldn’t find anywhere in Belfast that we could use! I eventually found I could hire a couple of tripods from Calumet, but they weren’t quite what we were after since they didn’t have proper video heads, but they would have to do! Oh, and annoyingly, the bank decided to cancel my work debit card the day before (fraudulent activity supposedly!), so I had to hire both a car and the kit (along with deposits!) on my own card!

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by Gareth

Birmingham (still) Live!

Peter, Ashley, me, Karen, Michael, Ava and Ian.

Last weekend I was down in Birmingham for a re-union with some of the people I worked with in my first full time job at Birmingham Live TV.

It’s been 14½ years since we’d all seen each other, and I was a bit worried that it’d be really weird, but it genuinely felt like hardly any time had passed at all!

There were seven of us in all – me, Ian, Michael, Karen (who now lives in America), Ashley, Ava, and our old boss Peter (who was also my boss later at MUTV!)

It was a really fun night, and hopefully it won’t take almost 15 years for us to meet up again!

by Gareth

The Boy With Tape On His Face

Last night me, James and Rob Oldfield went to the Contact Theatre to see ‘The Boy With Tape On His Face‘. He’s managed by Lee from Gag Reflex, so he got us some complimentary tickets for his Manchester show.

We got there in time for the support act, who if I’m totally honest wasn’t great. He didn’t really tell jokes, but rambled on about stuff that wasn’t really funny! And I don’t think the tone of his material really complemented what was to come from the main event.

So, the main show… how on earth do you describe it?!

The Boy is fundamentally a mime artist, but not in the way you’d image when hearing that term. His show involves lots of music, random household props, audience interaction, and lots of red balloons! And even though there’s no speaking, so much humour is conveyed in his actions! I don’t want to give any of the gags away, but it’s genius, and if you get a chance to see his show, then you definitely should!

Afterwards, we were invited to join them for a curry at the Moon in Withington – Lee hadn’t been at the show, but met us there and introduced us to Sam (TBWTOHF) and his support act, Phil (awkward!)

It was really cool though, and Sam is a fascinating person, and very talkative without the tape over his mouth! He told us about him starting out as a clown in his native New Zealand, and all the crazy stuff he got up to as a street performer!

by Gareth

Catch-up of last few weeks

I thought I’d do a bit of a catch-up of what I’ve been up to recently, so here goes!

Last month, I got to see Rob Bell speak at !Audacious in Manchester. I’d caught him at Greenbelt back in 2009 (but was hard to hear because it was outdoors and I was quite a way from the stage). He was on a book tour of the UK, and the night was billed as ‘An evening with Rob Bell’, which meant he could talk about stuff in his new book, as well as talk about other things, and also take questions from the audience.

I know he’s often regarded as controversial, but I did find a lot of what he had to say really interesting and thought provoking, although I think there are things he says that I’m not sure I agree with, but I’m glad I went to hear it.

Then, the following week, we had a bit of a Sharp Tenants social night! After a successful trip to the Frog & Bucket back in March to see some comedy, our next thing was a curry night at Akbar’s on Liverpool Street.

Christian and Alex.

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by Gareth

dM in the local press

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Got a nice little article about doodledoMOTION in this week’s Greater Manchester Business Week in their new feature – ‘Brief Introduction’.  Pretty pleased with it, but we really could do with a better publicity photo – this was one the paper took back in 2011 at The Sharp Project official opening!

The article is also on the Manchester Evening News website here.

by Gareth

AFC video shoot

Last weekend, I was down in Gloucester filming with the Austin Francis Connection to produce a music video for one of their tracks! I first met Edi from the group a couple of years ago at Greenbelt, and have seen them at various events since then, and we’ve often got around to talking about the possibility of working together, and it’s now finally happened!

Edi.

I drove down really early on Saturday morning, and met the guys on the top of a multi-storey car park… they’d had an idea to shoot some of it on there, but I discovered they hadn’t got any permissions so we quickly looked for a plan B! Since we were going to have to shoot mostly guerrilla-style, we decided to stick to public places where we were unlikely to encounter security guards, and drove around to a park in the city centre and unloaded the jib and camera gear.

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by Gareth

Crazy few weeks!

It’s been a busy few weeks, but first off, me and James have been on TV these last few weeks!

I wrote a while back that we were doing all the graphics for Jo Brand’s new documentary series on Dave – ‘Jo Brand’s Big Splash‘, so back in May, we went down to London to be in the audience for the recording of the stand-up section of the series.

Well, the series started on Dave a few weeks ago, an we both make an appearance in audience cutaways at various points! And I’m pretty sure they used our laughs over the punchlines of different jokes!

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by Gareth

Sharp Project launch and some publicity!

It’s been 10 months now since doodledoMOTION moved into the Sharp Project, and last week saw the official opening of the building with the handover from the developers to Manchester Council. When we moved in last September, there were a lot less people in there, but now most of our section is full, the original part is quite full, and the 2 main production stages have standing sets in them for ‘Mount Pleasant‘ and ‘Fresh Meat‘.

Christian, Matt, me and Hogan.

With the official opening, the final Gold section is now taking tenants – I don’t think we’re in a massive rush to move down there because I actually like the quirkiness of our converted shipping containers, and the amount of space we’ve got works well for us.

Anyway, it was a busy night, with a load of BMX riders and skateboarders racing past our unit for most of it, although I don’t really know who any of the invited guests were.  I’m guessing a lot of them were council-related people as opposed to any from the media industry, but hopefully there’ll be more events in the future that attracts a more relevant crowd.

And then yesterday, following on from an interview me and James gave to a reporter at the launch night, there’s been an article published about the company in Greater Manchester Business Week (also published on the Manchester Evening News website).

To be honest, I’d have rather it’d focused on some of our other bits of work, but it’s still all good publicity. In fact the only annoying thing is they’ve got me and James the wrong way on the photo!

business-week

by Gareth

Jo Brand’s Big Splash recording

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Me and James have just spent the last couple of days down in London, partly for a meeting about some more graphics we’re doing for a Channel 5 documentary later this year, but also we were down there to go to the Hackney Empire, where we were in the audience for the recording of Jo Brand doing stand-up for a show that’s going to be on Dave later this year.

doodledoMOTION are doing titles and graphics for the 5-part series called ‘Jo Brand’s Big Splash’, which will mix the stand-up gig with a documentary about water, which sees Jo trying out loads of different activities including swimming, diving and rafting.

Because we were guests, we got front row circle seats, so there’s a good chance we could end up in some audience shots in the final edit.  And knowing the way editing works, I can almost guarantee that they’ll cut us laughing at some innocent joke as the reaction to something really inappropriate!!

It was actually a really good gig – I wasn’t quite sure whether I’d find it that funny, but I think Jo’s comedy has become a lot more inclusive, whereas in the past it had quite a reputation of being feminist and man-hating. I don’t really know whether it ever really was, but that’s kind of what gets associated with her!
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by Gareth

Tom’s wedding

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Last weekend I trekked down to Bideford for a pretty special day – Tom Green’s wedding to Vicky!

Tom’s probably my oldest friend – we spend pretty much all our time together when we were kids… whilst at school we tried to start TV and radio stations, produced the school magazine and a yearbook, made a short film, wrote a ‘commercial’ computer game that earned us about £100(!), plus loads of other crazy ventures!

And then after school, we’ve kept in touch, firstly helping start up a community radio station together, and we’ve both then taken career paths in media – Tom in radio and me in tv and video.  We even shared a house together in Birmingham in the summer of 1997!

Anyway, Tom’s been living in the UAE for the last few years, and was in Cairo before that, so we don’t see other loads, but do keep in touch online, and have caught up when he’s been back in the UK visiting family.

So when I was invited to his wedding down in Devon, there was no way I was going to miss it!  It was a heck of a long journey down there from Manchester, but I stayed at a Travelodge on the M5 the night before to break it up a little bit, and then stayed in Bideford on the Saturday night after the reception.

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by Gareth

Summer 2010

Thought I’d better do a bit of a recap about what’s been going on over the summer, and I supposed the first thing I need to blog about is that we had a bit of a setback at work last month when we had a break-in at the office.

Basically, the whole top floor of our building was targeted, and the burglars broke into about 50 separate units in all! Most businesses had stuff stolen, but it seems like we were the worst hit, with us losing 3 iMacs and a Macbook Pro, plus all our filming kit comprising of a Sony EX3 and Z1, as well as a load of audio stuff as well.  It’s been a pretty horrible experience – luckily we’ve only lost a bit of work since they didn’t take our server or external hard drives, which would have destroyed us really since we hadn’t really got a decent back-up of all our work. But it’s just so gutting that you put so much time and effort into building the business to have some scum just take it away from you.

Anyway, we’re currently looking at options for what to do next – hopefully we’ve got a new office lined up because I really don’t want us to go back to our old one, because I think it might just happen again if they don’t sort out the security issues.  Should have a clearer idea of the future soon.

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On to happier stuff… at the beginning of August, Rob and Clare got married in a field in Mellor (a small village not too far from Stockport), and I was one of the 12 ushers who were all dressed fully in white!

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by Gareth

I’m a geek!

Last night I was at a Geek Party at Rob & Jenny Kay’s, where you had to go dressed as something inspired by geek chic! Now it may come as real surprise (since I am a bit of a self-confessed geek) that I was really struggling with a costume for the night, but with a couple of days to go, I suddenly hit on gold!

I decided to go as the ultimate geek – Mr Dave Bateman!

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To make this dream a reality, I wondered about the best way to go about it, even Googling to find out how to make an actual 3d head(!), but finally settled on printing his face onto some card to make an oversized mask, with a couple of eyeholes punched through his actual eyes!

It wasn’t the most comfortable thing to wear for the whole evening if I’m honest, but I really enjoyed how it slightly freaked people out as they talked to me!

When Dave himself finally arrived around 10 o’clock, I think he found it pretty strange to have a bobbing-head version of him staring right back!

And the mask proved so popular that everyone wanted to wear it!

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Check out the full set of photos from the party in my Facebook photo album.

So what else? Well, going back a couple of weekends, I was down in Tamworth for Brandon and Chloe’s 2nd birthday party!

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by Gareth

New Year, and dM work on Five

paulmertonineurope

Tonight sees two programmes with titles and graphics done by doodledoMOTION on Five in prime time!  First off, ‘Paul Merton In Europe‘ started last Monday night at 9pm, and we did the title sequence for the show (which has had so much work and detail put into it!), as well as the maps which show Paul’s journey across Europe.  It’s the 3rd travel series of ‘Paul Merton In…’ that Tiger Aspect have done following on from his documentaries about China and India, and so far the reaction to this new series seems really positive.

And then the second show for Five we’ve been involved in is also a Tiger programme – ‘Celebrity Quitters‘.  It’s a ten-part reality series that’s going to be on every week-night for the next 2 weeks, and features Linda Robson, John Burton Race, Chloe Madeley, Paul Danan and Derek Acorah as they all try to give up smoking.  We’ve done the titles and graphics for the main show, as well as their online content.

celebrity-quitters

The programme starts at 7.30pm tonight, and to promote the show, Linda Robson, one of the Celebrity Quitters, appeared on BBC’s Breakfast this morning for an interview, where they showed some clips from the series.

It was a good promo for the show, but the best bit was that the main title graphic that we’ve produced appeared on the big screen behind them throughout the whole interview which is really cool!

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Back to the beginning of the month, and on New Year’s Day, I went for a walk over at Alderley Edge with a group of Reach guys.

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by Gareth

Pre-Christmas catch-up

Just thought I’d do a quick catch up before Christmas. I’m currently at James and Helen’s house babysitting Jess, and there’s nothing decent on TV so I thought I’d do this!

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We’ve had quite a bit of snow these last few days, and yesterday a few of us went for a walk in Macclesfield Forest. It was freezing cold, and we walked quite a way – and seemed to be going uphill a lot more than downhill – but it was a really great afternoon.

We were kind of busking it a little bit, since we didn’t have a map or anything, and the cloud came down quite quickly as we made it to the top of one of the hills – but Penny had been to the forest before, so had a rough idea of where we needed to go! Though there were times when I wasn’t convinced we were ever going to make it back to the cars, especially when we’d been walking so long that it got dark!!

There are some photos I took of our walk here.

Work’s been quite busy recently, and we’re trying to wrap some jobs up before we finish for Christmas. We’re working on graphics for two shows on that will be on Channel 5 early next year, so really need to try and get them pretty much sorted by Wednesday at the latest.

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