Its almost June already, the first half of 2024 has flown over so quickly so heres a quick recap of whats been going on so far. After the joy awards 2024 I had a week or so at home and then it was time for the yearly snowboarding trip. There was 8 of us going out his year to La Clusaz, James, Charlie and myself form the UK, Ruben and Fernando from Spain and finally Matt Pillerin and their 1 year old Tilda from Estonia.
We all met in La Clusaz to be greeted by some incredibly hot weather and immediately thinking that the snow wasn’t going to last very long at this rate. Luckly up on the slopes it was still cold enough and we all spent a great week on the slopes during the day and eating drinking and playing board games on the evening.
We managed to get sa few black runs in this year without any injury and this is Matt, Ruben, Fernando & Myself at Massif de Balme where despite the heat in the town we always had plenty of snow on the top of the mountain. As always it was a great week in La Cluzas well spent with friends.
Straight after snowboarding I was headed to ProductionPark at Wakefield to help Pete Tilling program the 2024 Niall Horan tour. We had Caspar and Jos from SHOP doing content who I believe we had met on email, on another job and nice to finally meet in person.
I’d done some pre production for the moving Austrian screen and the general project setup but onsite there was some quite heavy lighting integration where we were sending lots of video to DMX from table screens in d3, mainly the light box above the stage and we tried sending to some of the movers upstage but that part was cut as it just didn’t work.
For over a year now each time I’m programming a show and in rehersals mode I put some animated googly eyes up which I made in January 2023 on one of the Joy awards and they have became a staple programming asset since then.
During Niall programming the eyes were up on the border between rehearsing songs, as we got closer to final rehearsals Ben, the creative director told us he, and Niall would like to keep the googly eyes in the show.
I found it so funny and quite pleased that they wanted to keep the eyes which come up on the last song just before the band come on, and below is me at the first show in Belfast late Feb 2024.
Shortly after returning from Belfast I was down London with Graymatter for a ITV showcase/premier thing at Leicester Square Odeon cinema. It was nice to see Dan from Graymatter and also Dave & Toby from Hawthorn who I didn’t know were going to be there.
The operating position was at the very back row of seats in the cinema and was pretty cosy, “Smile for the camera Dan!’
Another fun thing which happened in February was the d3 “after dark” event aimed to help the company reconnect with the user community. It was great to meet old friends and put faces to names of new friends. The gathering started at d3 hq at southwark and then we splintered off to a few pubs. After the event it was even more unclear which direction the company disguise is heading but everyone had a good time chatting shit and trying to figure it out.
There’s has been many other things and jobs that have happened this year but unfortunately for the blog, so many projects are under NDA these days so can’t write about this at the moment.
After the d3 get together my next job was with the lovely people at Pixway with Paul & Ron in Amsterdam. This was a big dealer conference presenting the new line up from BMW for next 18 month. The whole event was very locked down and we all had to deposit our phones in a locker prior to going into the venue for work. this made communication quite difficult too as very few people were given radio coms.
I was programming the evening show and I definitely got the easy end of the job as Paul & Ron had to deal with late content which is never fun.
It was a great week and lovely to catch up with Paul & Ron, at one point Ron and myself had both brought a couple of packets of troop waffles to work and we did collectively and up eating them all before the end of the day.
I think that’s enough of an update so far, it’s kinda unbelievable that we are halfway through 2024 already and it feels like its just begun. here’s to a just as enjoyable second half to the year.