Everything is a project!

If there is one thread that runs throughout my career it’s this:

Everything is a project.

And I LOVE a project!

What I like about a project is that it has a start, a middle and an end. It has a budget and a brief. There is a deadline. There is a client. And an outcome you need to deliver on. There are objectives. There is a team of people who assemble around the project.

I like the pressure and accountability of delivering a project. I started my full time career thirty four summers ago in 1990. Much of my career is hard to plot in a neat LinkedIn trajectory, but when I look back, what I can identify is the distinctive and respective projects.

Yesterday afternoon I found myself in Lexington Street, Soho - the site of one of my favourite projects from the start of my career. Thirty years ago the building behind me was home to Wiseman, a TV post production company. I spent a lot of time here in the summer of 1991 when I was post-production assistant on Channel 4’s music show 'Friday at the Dome.' Every Thursday evening, the night before transmission, we’d get together in the online edit suite and assemble all the VT - the pre-recorded elements - for that week’s show. An interview with Sinead O’Connor or Elvis Costello. An acoustic set by REM or Aaron Neville. Sitting behind the show’s editor Roy Ackerman and whoever was in the video editing chair I learned a lot about how to make TV. I probably didn’t realise it at the time, just how fortunate I was: at the age of 22 living my teenage dream working in music TV.

Back then, it was just another day at work, it was just another project.