AKA Showreel

2012

This doesn’t cover the video’s process as much of the story behind it.

I was made redundant from a production job at a small publishing business back in late 2009. I had effectively been their head of production. Shooting, editing, writing, you name it. I thought finding a new job would take a couple of months. It didn’t. It took nearly sixteen horrible, soul-destroying months, and in the end, I made the job myself, thanks solely to the client of this job, AKA a big events and marketing agency.

AKA was my very first client. I applied for a job there in 2010 and got an interview, but I failed to get the job because of my lack of celebrity knowledge (of all the things to fail on!). Several months later, I was contacted by the guy who did get the job and asked if I was available to storyboard and animate a pitch video. After some back and forth with the Job Centre (I was signing on), I said yes.

You see, I had been a shooter, but during my unemployment, I’d self-taught myself After Effects and Cinema 4D (on an underpowered Netbook, too – it was all I could afford after redundancy), upped my editing game in Premiere and met some uber-talented folk in London’s vibrant creative scene. The guy at AKA had been impressed with my reel and creativity and bought me on board. The success of that job led to others from AKA.

I found myself at one point in a meeting with creatives from Dreamworks, which was surreal at the time. I’d spent sixteen months in unemployment feeling utterly useless, and now this team at AKA was trusting me to be in a meeting with one of their clients, Dreamworks. Mind blown!

Anyway, the concept of this showreel for AKA was to bring together what AKA did at the time. The AKA team pretty much gave me carte blanche. The biggest challenge was to bring the website and poster work to life, so I did that with transitions, animated elements and live-action.

I worked with AKA until 2016 when they bought two film and video agencies in London with their own editing and motion design teams. I occasionally freelanced at both places for a while, working on some big IPs, but I moved out of London in 2015, and the commute back into the big smoke was not fun. Plus, I was so over London at that time of my life.

Through the people I met at AKA,I found new clients through referrals. I have a lot to thank AKA for.