A blank piece of paper is one of the most frightening things for any creative. It screams possibility and dreams but provides no structure or grounds to base your next masterpiece on. This weekend I have been handed a blank piece of paper.

For the first time in months, maybe even a year, I have a weekend where I have no plans. I have nothing that requires my immediate attention, nothing that demands my presence, I’m just waiting around and killing time before my hectic week. TinyGrab’s been set on auto-pilot, my friends and loved ones are all busying themselves and my current financial restraints stop me from doing anything impulsive or going somewhere. In short I now have to entertain myself for an entire weekend. This is a scary proposition for someone who hasn’t really rested or stopped in years. I’m always working on that next big project, but now I have silence. Upon suggestion of my good friend Alex Hill, I’m taking on the task of creating a short film over the weekend; something that I can be proud of and place in my portfolio.

I haven’t been creative in the video space for such a long time. The last time I really got my teeth into filming and producing content was when Vueo was still around and even then I felt too much like a corporate shill, I wasn’t being creative. This weekend I hope to change all of that and make something that I can truly be proud of.

Staring at this blank piece of paper before me I have no clue what’s going to spring from my mind, all I know is this; I have one weekend, no crew, no actors, no budget and a blank piece of paper. Let’s see what I can do.

Chris Leydon.

Recently I’ve spent a lot of time working on my new online portfolio. Back in Nobember I bought the domain name chrisleydon.tv with the intent of turning it into an entertainment channel. A channel that would have been full of blogs, video shows and short films. Whilst this is a long term dream, something I want Keyone Productions to be able to achieve, I realised that it wasn’t something that was plausable for chrisleydon.tv at the present time.

An online entertainment channel requires constant updating with fresh content. It requires time and love, two things which I can’t give to such a project at this current moment in time. I needed to come up with another use for my domain.

Over the past two months and the holiday season, many ideas and concepts have come and gone. The concept that I settled on was to turn chrisleydon.tv into a place for my portfolio. I could have done this through a page on my blog, but I decided that it was wise to have a completely seperate and independant site for this project.

The design of the portfolio was something that was crucial. I wanted as much space as possible for a widescreen flash video player, but I also wanted incredible ease of use. After a few mockups in Photoshop I settled on the final design that is currently being used, the next step was to code the site.

I’ve dabbled with web design and coding in the past, as regular blog readers will know, however this is my most ambitious web project to date. To save on loading pages I wanted everything to be on one page. For accessibility reasons I didn’t want the entire site to be flash based. I required a system whereby the user click on a video to play and it plays in the central video player. From past experiences I knew that this was plausable with little hard work. Such a system is put into use on the Mevio website, as well as the new Podzone site (coded by Owen Jones).

The problem with using the systems from Mevio and The Podzone is that both of those sites run off a content management system, something which I didn’t want to use. As I’m not the most fantastic coder in the world I needed a little help with Javascript, so I reached out into the Twitter community. Sam Starling, student and web coder, replied to my message and created a demo with a walkthrough. This enabled me to code my project with ease, whilst learning how it all worked. I am forever indebted to him for this.

My portfolio, as it stands, contains some of my best work from over the past year and a half. It will continue to be updated with more work as it appears. No doubt that Project New York will play a crucial part in it. That’s the story of my online portfolio. Should you want to check it out, head on over to www.chrisleydon.tv.

Chris Leydon.