I guess it’s fair to say that I’ve had my fair share of pet projects. Some I’ve seen through to the end, some I stick with and some lay in the category of half baked ideas.

Towards the end of April myself and two friends got together and had a friendly discussion. This talk would change all of our plans for the following year, completely. We’d finished our last exam and were talking about what each of us would like to do for the next year. I attend Staffordshire University and after your second year of studies you’re given several options as to what to do for your third year. Everyone is given the option to continue straight away with their degree, or they could take a year off to go on a work placement. There is a third option, however. Students are given the opportunity to pitch viable business ideas to a University board. Those who are successful are given a £3,000 grant and an office on the University’s Business Village. These scheme is called Speed. After many drinks and endless hours of talking myself and my two friends had decided to apply for the Speed scheme together. We just needed an idea.

Ever since my time working for Mevio, as their intern, I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of creating my own online video network. I suggested the idea of creating an online video network to my two partners (Hannah and Gemma), who after a few hours seem to love the idea. We’re all creative film makers at heart so the dream of owning our own channel, where our own content was published, sounded like a dream come true. We pitched the concept to the Speed panel and we were awarded a place on the scheme.

Vueo is the name of the forthcoming online video entertainment channel, aimed at UK students, which is owned and operated by Vueo Ltd. The idea behind Vueo is to have 5 stable shows. All of these shows shall be internally produced and constantly in production. Vueo aims to be pretty much like a standard television channel, but with a twist. New content shall appear every day of the week and we have a schedule. Every Monday there’ll be a new episode of the Travel show, Tuesday the Challenge show, Wednesday the music show etc… However you can decided which order you watch these shows in. You can watch them in the set schedule, or pick and mix your favourite bits. We’re also allowing access to the full archive of shows. Once a show has been aired it will always be around and available for viewing / download. Essentially Vueo is the independent UK student equivalent to the BBC’s iPlayer. This is the video on demand dream that I’ve been preaching for the past year and thinking about for even longer.

Due to various non-dsiclosure agreements that’s all I can say about Vueo for now. Launching in February 2010, Vueo is set to become a prime place to get your fresh creative video content.

Chris Leydon.

The last few weeks that have just gone by were extremely stressful for my workload. In all honesty, the past three months were incredibly stressful for my workload, full stop.

To refresh your memories, for my University course this semester I had to create a 3 – 10 minute film on anything I wanted. My initial ideas developed into Project New York, a project that was put on hold after a relationship breakdown and a financial storm. The film then evolved into what would have been called “The Woman on the Roof”, sadly due to the lack if a rooftop this film had to undergo a change too.

“Brydges Place” is the name of the thinnest alleyway in London. It’s also the setting and the name for the film that was once called “The Woman on the Roof”. Why the name change and no roof? Sadly the company who managed the rooftop that I wished to film on had to cancel on me at the last minute, due to lack of manpower within their organisation. Like most films I’ve worked on, a bailout plan had to be worked on at the last minute. The bailout plan revolved around shooting in various locations in Westminster with a cut down version of the original “The Woman on the Roof” script.

It’s interesting to see how this University film has changed around the current situations in my life. When I was in love with a man in New York, I wanted to create a drama tackling the low key homopobia that can be found in some parts of the city. When I was going through a breakdown and looking for an escape, the film changed into “The Woman on the Roof” a film about someone coming to peace and terms with everything. In some sort of weird way this film is still dedicated to the person who it was intended to be made for, it’s just now circumstances have changed and we’re all moving on with our lives.

My flash player, for reasons unknown to me, doesn’t seem to be working at the moment. Should you wish to see “Brydges Place”, please click on the image to be redirected to my online portfolio, CHRISLEYDON.TV, where you can watch it in a nice high quality working flash player.

Chris Leydon.

The future of traditional broadcast media is something that has been debated for the past several years. Recently, however, there seems to be a general consensus; traditional broadcast media will not last for another 5 years.

Television as a medium is dead. People are sick of having to watch content when a channel deems it fit. Previously this was the only means of getting programming out into the world, but this linear format is defunct. The technology for the public to have content, on demand, has really been around since the 80s. The video cassette recorder allowed the public, at home, to be in charge of the content that they wanted to watch. For the first time you were in control of what you watched and when you watched it. The success of this technology is evident, we still use video recorders to this day; in the 21st century though, they have evolved onto the digital stage.

The huge future of video on demand services was truly realised when Digital Video Recorders were introduced. TiVo and Sky+ allowed the public to record a seemingly unlimited amount of content and watch it when they wanted to. The problem with this system is that you’re still restricted to the big television companies controlling how often you could record your content. You had to wait for the programme to be broadcast over the television network, so that you could record it in real time. It still wasn’t truly content on demand.

The BBC started experimenting with internet radio towards the end of the 1990′s. They had discovered the potential that the internet had as a content delivery system. In the early 2000′s the BBC started to allow users to stream archived radio shows for up to a week after their original broadcast date. The quality was poor, the technology was flaky, but it allowed people to realise where the future of on demand content laid, the internet. The technology behind the BBC’s online radio services was so successful that other broadcasters started to follow suit.

When Bill Gates started talking about IPTV at CES back in 2007, personally I was imaging television (in its current linear format) being streamed via the tubes of the internet, to a television. A new delivery system. I now realise how wrong I was. Within the past 4 years the phenomenon of podcasting has gone mainstream, many people don’t realise that they’re doing it, or don’t call it podcasting, but the basic infrastructure is the same. Companies such as Mevio (or Revision 3) are starting to deliver fresh, high quality, custom created content to viewers worldwide every single day. Admittedly the primary way of watching this content right now is by streaming it through a web browser, but imagine what one could achieve if it was incorporated with a tool such as Boxee. We would truly have a seemingly unlimited amount of fresh high quality content, right at our finger tips, on demand.

Sometime within the next one or two years, perhaps even within the next few months, we’ll start to see boxes under television sets replacing digital tuners. No more satellite, no more cable, no more freeview; just the “magic box”. Hopefully this box will be running a system such as Boxee, but it will give everyone intuitive easy access to great quality content. We’ll have our “Channels” delivered in a way that Mevio currently is pioneering, where you can hop in and hop out of programming. We’ll have our films ready to go at the push of a button. A back catalogue of all of our favourite shows will be forever easy to watch. I am aware that there are systems that exist like this anyway, what I’m trying to say is that this box will be your ONLY box. The BBC, ITV, ABC, NBC will have to realise this soon. The only way that they’re going to survive is to make all of their content on demand and to lose the linear format of broadcasting. The linear format is old, it’s tired, it’s outdated, it’s no longer practical.

The end is nigh for traditional broadcast television, make way for the real digital media revolution.

Chris Leydon.

Escape, we all need one. We all need to get away from the slum of day to day life. We all need to feel free and clear our head. We all need a clear vision. Where can you go for this relief? That’s your choice.

What is such a dark or deep intro for a post doing on my blog, you may wonder. Don’t worry, I haven’t become some sort of manic depressive. The paragraph above is a quick teaser synopsis of the idea behind my latest film project. What’s happened to Project New York? This has. This, for the time being, is Project New York.

For various reasons, business and personal, the film that I was planning to film in New York had been put on hold. This doesn’t mean that the project has been cancelled, I still plan to make it one day, the story is very close to my heart. However, my film module requires me to man a film this semester so I had to brain storm a new idea. The working title for the film is “The Woman on the Roof”.

“The Woman on the Roof” revolves around a young woman who has recently been raped. She goes to the top of the roof several weeks later, to relive the entire event, looking for some sort of escape. It’s not necessarily the film that I set out to make, or wanted to make, but nevertheless it is now the film that I am making. Maybe it has to do with the mood that I was in when I wrote the script. I was going through an emotional time and needed a release, I guess this film is my roof. I’ve channelled all of my hurt feelings into this project, I just hope that it pays off.

Location hunting for this film has been relatively easy, getting in touch with said locations though has been much harder than expected. As it stands I currently have one location out of three; with a week to go before shooting this is perhaps not a great thing. For this location, however, I am having to hire a policeman to be on set at all times. Apparently you can’t fake the scene of a rape on the streets of London, without a police officer present. I have no idea how much this will cost me, but let’s see.

If all goes to plan, shooting will all be done in one day. These “let’s shoot it all in one day” plans tend never to work, I hope that this one bucks the trend. This is the only window that I have to shoot it, due to equipment and University rehearsal schedules, so I really hope that it all manages to come together.

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.

Its been well over a month since I last made a posting here, incase you haven’t noticed a lot of my posts talk about how long its been since my previous post. One must really get out of that habit.

I started back at University this week. It’s all fairly easy going at the moment, but that’s because we’re only just learning what our assignments actually are. Having said that, the assignment for Studio Production still remains the same: to create a TV studio programme and broadcast it, this shan’t be until March though.

The assignment that I’m focusing all of my attention on, at the moment, is for Film Technology. This is the last semester in which we truly get complete freedom to make the best films we can. There are several options on how you can be assessed. The first option is to be marked as an individual, doing your own project. The second and third options are group based; you can be marked as a member of a crew, or equally. Personally I have chosen to work alone for this project, at least for the conception stages.

The working title for my film, is “Project New York”. Incase you hadn’t guessed by the title, I really want to shoot my next piece in New York. From the ideas that I’ve had and the initial stages that I’ve taken to achieve them, I really think that this is going to be my best work so far. My masterpiece. I’m not going to give too many details away on the project here yet. Instead, I’m going to create a new production blog, which can be found at www.projectnewyork.co.uk. I expect the first post will be up sometime today.

There’s a lot more I want to talk about but I feel as though those topics deserve their own blog post. Instead I’m going to wrap this post up and head on over to projectnewyork.co.uk to set that up. I’m thinking a video/written blog.

Chris Leydon.

Fighting the rumours by writing another blog post, I’m not dead… yet. Busy I have been incredibly so over the past few weeks. As the Christmas holidays approach, my Uni deadlines start to creep in ever so slowly. As is customary with this time of year, I’ve been running left right and centre like a headless chicken, attempting to meet deadlines. Thankfully I seem to have met most of them for now.

Visual Media Applications, as a few people may be aware, is a module in my course, that teaches the basics of Adobe After Effects. Earlier on in the semester I had to follow a set of course tutorials. These tutorials had room for improvisation and encouraged creativity. They allowed me to get to grips with the powerful software package, whilst allowing me to experiment and play around.

The short tutorials were only a small part of my total assessment. My final assignment was to create a 30 second animation, within After Effects, based on either part of or an entire book. I chose to use the opening paragraph from Stephen Clarke’s “Talk To The Snail”. A video of how the animation turned out is above, feedback is always appreciated.

Chris Leydon.

I feel so overworked recently. I’ve been having to pull all nighters just to get my work done in time. I suppose in one respect it’s my own fault, allowing all of my deadlines to pile up; in another though, why do I have so much work in the first place? By the end of this week I have to have completed all of the Bishops’ College Videos (that Keyone Productions were commissioned to produce), I have a pantomime video scene for OTFM Productions and my University Film Tech work is due in too.

With the first draft of the second Anti-Bullying video for Bishops’ College complete, I now have more time to concentrate on my University work. One thing I must say that I am proud of though, is the video intro that I created for the Bishops’ documentary. Using a lot of the knowledge that I gained from my Visual Media Applications lectures this year, I set forth to produce one of the best intros I’ve created yet. A copy of the video intro is above, should one wish to view it. Feed back is always appreciated.

This is a short post, mainly because I’m suffering from sleep deprivation and am unsure of how to phrase things. Another reason why this is a short post, is because I need to finish my work and meet my deadlines. I also didn’t plan this post, it was spontaneous. This post is basically an excuse to show case my new intro!

Chris Leydon.

[See post to watch Flash video]

[See post to watch Flash video]

Blogging can be a chore at times. This is not the post that I originally intended to write this evening, however, how were you to know that until now?

A new type of Podcasting network is being launched by a young entrepreneur, Lewis King. Citrus 7 Media promises to deliver clean, fresh new media podcasts 7 days a week. Although it’s early stages and the project hasn’t hit the public yet, I can tell that it’s going to create some waves in the industry.

Podcasting companies, such as Mevio or Revision 3, are fantastic; however, they all seem to have their avoidable faults. They’re too focused on commercialisation, making a profit, and not on the actual content itself. Now whilst content may be king on some other podcasting networks (such as the Teen Podcasters Network) the lack of production values lets the overall presentation down. There needs to be a middle ground, great looking and sounding content with substance. That is what Citrus 7 Media aims to create.

Now, sceptics would have probably worked out by now that I have some sort of vested interest in Citrus 7 Media; this is not wholly untrue. I personally am fed up and frustrated with the ways that certain podcasting companies carry out their business. I, once again, want to see producers creating great content for the love of doing so. This did happen, and was a regular occurrence, during the early stages of podcasting; this practice seems to have faded away. I want to see Citrus 7 Media succeed because I want great fresh high quality content.

I have already become involved with Citrus 7 Media, more or less from the off. I’m excited to see the kind of buzz that this small network can produce. All one has to do is look at the Twitter results for “Citrus 7″ to see what I mean. My role, so far, in this budding venture, has been to create the Citrus 7 Media ident; the animation of the network logo that will play before a show (See video above). I have also been reviving my old concept of a video production show; a show based around teaching the basics of video production, in a fun way.

Vidproquo will be THE video show for any wannabe video producer. The show will advise, inform and entertain… most of all it will be fresh high quality content. Filming for the first season is due to commence in December. The introduction video for Vidproquo is above.

Citrus 7 Media promises to deliver fresh content 7 days a week, let’s see if it can live up to its promise when it launches sometime very soon.

Chris Leydon.

Last week I made another journey back to that certain special school in Gloucester, Bishops’ College. This journey was in relation to two new promotional films that they’d commissioned Keyone Productions to produce. In case you can’t recall, or you haven’t read one of the previous posts, in July Keyone Productions produced a short promotional film for the school; it was a highlights reel of what had gone on during their Year 7 Induction week. The film got a warm reception and as a result the school commissioned 3 further videos to be produced throughout the 08 / 09 academic year.

Two videos were shot on Friday, one was another highlights stream (for the school’s anti-bullying day), the other was an interview/documentary on the school children’s perspective of bullying. I started work on the post production for the highlights video on Saturday, the first cut was finished on Sunday evening. Whilst the feedback for the first cut was good, the school requested that a number of changes and additions be made; such as the addition of titles to narrate some of the shots.

Chris Leydon.