Part 1 - Where are We? 

2025 has seen some big changes for me. What started out as a pretty daunting challenge, a looming possibility of having to lose my room in London, and a real sense that I’d have to go right back to square one, has ended somewhat comfortably, in a new place with guaranteed work ahead, as well as a much improved portfolio to back me up into the new year.

It certainly feels like a foundation has really been laid out this year, and a healthy amount of proof that what I’m doing can sustain the life I lead. Though, maybe I need to reel some aspects in to remain sustainable. After a particularly busy period of various projects going on, I believe my trip to Vancouver for a wedding might have been a little over-indulgent. On the one hand, maybe that was my personal reward for finally being able to do that without worry, on the other hand maybe life would be a little easier had I reeled it in a little. On balance, who cares it was fun! 

While the first half of 2025 was pretty crazy, I would say the latter half has been pretty manageable. Maybe better time management, or a better understanding of how to manage the work I was given, maybe it was less work. Either way, I’d say overall everything has been fairly plain sailing coming into the end of this year. 

Work has been a lot more balanced between being behind the camera, and behind the editors screen. A trip to Coventry and Preston to manage some shoots were pretty valuable experiences, but topping that was a recent trip to Amsterdam for a shoot. Working abroad was the top priority on the 2025 bucket-list, and doing that shoot at the end of the year felt like a pretty poetic end to what I would call a largely successful year for my freelancing. 

Learning is still being done though. I’m finding that with the smaller details that provide big impacts. Animations are getting smoother, camera operations are getting sharper with better preparation, things like sound are being employed more thoroughly to really complete the work I am producing. 

It’s an interesting thing looking back, just this week I updated my showreel. There’s a body of work I’m certainly proud to have my name attached to, but I see those small areas I would change. What I add would add or reorganise. I like the feeling of growth, but I suppose it’s a little bittersweet when you turn against your own work. Onwards and upwards I suppose. 

So I end 2025 more confident and happier with where I’m at for sure, but there are challenges on the way. New clients to work with, new projects to embark on, balancing my work with personal development pieces and getting onto the things I really want to do. All the while trying to keep up with the increased data-needs, and upgrade equipment to better manage future challenges. 

What I’m looking to do in 2026 is keep momentum; steady the ship, and continue to build out something sustainable. That’s going to take a lot more from me, and is going to require a more disciplined self to keep things regularly in order. I suppose you’ll have to read the next edition to see how that goes…

Part 2 - What’s Changed. 

There have been huge upgrades in the last six-months. To start with the first one, the location of operations has changed. King’s Cross no longer, I am working out of my bedroom flat in Brixton, the jewel of south-London. 

The move was for various reasons, if you read the last report you’ll know space became a big issue for me as equipment grew in quantity and size. Moving was a great moment to take stock of things, figure out what I had and what could go. Better still, how could items be categorised and stored well moving forward. With a greater amount of space, I could put things away. 

You’d think this would also be a great opportunity to throw some things away. In 2023, as a part of an office closing and impending redundancy, I was given 5 screens and arms. I kept them under my desk, ready to sell them or use them for some future project. I took them over to my new place of course. All scratched or broken screens. What a waste. What’s better is that they still exist in this new room taking up just as much space in my cupboard. It would be nice if something got done in the next six-months, but I suppose you’ll have to find out. 

A bigger room has allowed for a bit more space for a room-office also. Next to my bed is the provided desk, with a comfy provided chair I constantly stub my toe on, and two desktop monitors mounted, one incredibly scratched and the other surprisingly a 2K monitor that came with the place. Okay. 

My old desk had a two-monitor set-up, but space meant the chair was often occupied by something else. Who knew it would take this long to figure out, for motion-graphics and long edit jobs, two-monitor setups are the game-changer. 

The process is still the same, but I soon realised a lot of stress comes from constantly shifting between tabs to do separate tasks for one job. Two-monitors made my life so much easier and has been a dream development in the workspace. Would three make life easier in the future, or does that bring in problems of its own? 

As far as the physical workspace, a cinema-camera has entered into the arsenal. My entryway was the FX30, a downgrade on sensor size for sure, but a necessary upgrade. With higher requirements for more content in longer formats, the A7iii just couldn’t cut it. While it acts as a trusty B-cam, the FX30 has proven to be a great beast that can handle a whole lot. Going past 7 minutes of recording has been fantastic, being able to adjust my recording format to client needs has been fantastic. Working in S-Log3 as opposed to the needlessly horrific S-Log2 has done wonders. 

Of course along with a new camera means new storage requirements, and forking out for 2 CF-Express cards cumulating about 700GB has also been great to get the best out of camera quality. It’s not perfect, and kind of has to act as the stop-gap between now and getting a full-frame FX3, or if I really find success FX6, but it is covering every need I have at the moment. 

Speaking of storage, there has also been a huge upgrade in terms of general data storage, this being the introduction of my NAS. I’ve always been told to have three copies of a file, one native, one on a hard-drive and another in a separate location to mitigate all kinds of disaster. With a whole load of money put into data management, a NAS now lives at a separate location holding onto the last 2 years of freelance production. 

Only 8TB, I’m sure it won’t be long before an upgrade, but UGREEN have produced a great, sturdy model that also keeps all my data on a cloud. Should I need a file I can’t immediately access, the NAS has my back. 

Light have been upgraded by necessity. On a shoot in September, I used an LED light-setup I bought on the cheap in 2024 for a job. Shooting interviews for a full day, I was aware the light needed to be turned on and off regularly to avoid overheating, as it was incredibly inefficient. 

6pm that day, after 10 hours of shooting, collapsing the light allowed me to quickly find out that all wires and mount had melted through the day. So now I work with a new LED flat light that has been very trusted and helpful. It’s not the full package, but it’s been great to travel with. 

As far as the digital workspace, apart from storage and cloud upgrades, not much has changed past what is now required. The biggest upgrade has been the website, all praise to Richard Wallace, which has a more modern and sleeker aesthetic. Wix was great, but I was really jerry-rigging something together that was hard to change and definitely overcomplicated. 

Moving to Framer has been a learning curve, but everything feels a lot more intuitive and I’m finding the website is so much faster and easier to use. 

There are new apps. Envato for extra elements in my video, Otter for transcribing my shoots has been super-helpful, Vimeo for hosting my content and really that’s kind of been it. One learning this time is that Notta is dreadful. 

I’m between Figma and Illustrator for how I story-board my work. Illustrator makes the most sense as far as moving assets straight into After Effects (everything made in Figma is resaved in Illustrator), but Figma is so much better for commenting and working alongside clients seamlessly. There isn’t really a straight forward solution to this problem as far as I can see right now. 

The spreadsheet for work still exists, but I’m finding its use is less and less. Probably more a product of getting lazy as opposed to an inefficient system, though the format of this excel sheet definitely needs to be reassessed for the new year. 

Part 3 - Evaluation

I’ve already made clear that a lot of these upgrades have been necessary with the levels of work that have come up this year. No purchase has been wasted and I can’t express how much easier my life has been with stronger cameras, better lighting and more storage. Yes, they’ve been pretty hefty blows to my bank account, but they most certainly have allowed me to produce a greater level of content that allows for more growth, and therefore more money coming in. 

The big thing for 2025 has been the increase in the number of shoots I’ve had. Prior to doing personal projects, a bit of shadowing and small bits for past jobs, this has been the first year I’ve really taken charge of shoots and managing all logistics behind the camera. 

Though I knew this to an extent already, you do well to know that shoots are a quick-paced chaos. It’s a case of spinning so many plates at once. The aim is to get the right framed shot that sounds right and covers the right content in the right way. 

This requirement brings questions: what is the framing of the shot? Is there going to be movement or is it entirely static? Where are the light sources? How are you going to balance against them to keep the subject the best lit item in the frame? How are you going to keep from distractions? Where is the sound coming from? Is there potential for background noise to cause interference? How much interference would that be? Is the subject comfortable? How do we get the best out of them to avoid filming a rigid performer? What if the subject naturally moves a lot when they speak? 

These are just a sample of the questions that go into getting the best outcome in front of the camera. Behind the camera is another set of dilemmas: lights often need access to wall sockets. Extension cables are needed, which brings along trip hazards with wires. So tape is needed to mark it out and hold down the wires as best as possible. Cinema cameras love to eat up battery power, so spare batteries are needed. Failing that, the camera can be plugged in, so more wires are needed. Cards also fill-up pretty fast, and data needs to be backed up in the unfortunate event that files corrupt, or cards get lost, or solar flares render the data on your card unusable. It’s also super handy to have an on-hand view of how footage looks outside of the camera, because errors can be hard to spot when your camera is showing you safety zones, red-lines to show what’s in focus and zebra patterns to show what’s over/under exposed. 

Videographers know the best solutions to these problems, and they often come at a hefty price. Small-rig equipment can be your best friend, but it rarely comes for free. As much as the equipment I have right now does a great job at meeting the demands of my work, there’s always a ludicrously priced extension that can make my life while shooting a whole lot easier, and allow me to focus much more on the shot rather than managing potential catastrophes outside. 

Behind the computer, things are still running smooth. The macbook I bought in 2023 is a well-tested soldier and continues to meet the demands of 4K editing and long-hours rendering after-effects animations and vectors. 

While I continue to find my mastery of After Effects and compositing, the one thing I’m looking for in 2026 is efficiency to help streamline some processes. Just prior to writing this, I finally bit the bullet to invest in a few new plugins. 

Plugins have always been something I’m agnostic to. Why pay extra on top of what is being paid for Adobe to easier perform tasks I can try and complete within the native app? The answer is because, as amazing as After Effects is, the app is riddled with small bugs and inefficiencies that make life needlessly difficult. 

After Effects has been the cause of many sleepless nights, time-out walks and generally hyper-stressed and frustrated episodes this year, and I finally have come to the conclusion that the answer to my woes lies in a few extra plugins some geniuses have developed to make life that little-bit easier. 

On the data-side, as much as extra storage has been a great addition for the workspace, it’s hard to say it’s well and truly future-proofed. Now that’s a case of how much I’m willing to put my comfortable life at risk, but buying the NAS and two 8TB HDDs was already a big enough blow, but I do have caution in the back of mind wondering how long it might be before that needs to be upgraded. Hopefully a matter of years, but even still jobs now are starting to take a minimum of 250GB of storage, and that’s before considering the editing and compositing process. 

Also, separate from my job but still important. The new website has meant the previously existing blog no longer exists. These files all exist still, but a migration to substack is needed. Though a lot of potential in using substack for people to keep up with my writing (and definitely something I want to do much more of in the new year)

This section comes off very negative. As I’ve made clear, I’m very well equipped now to make big edits and successfully complete multi-day shoots. However the critical brain needs its exercise, and so I’m always somewhat critical of where the pitfalls are in the workspace so that I can know where exactly to improve. 

Part 4 - Where do we go? 

2026 will be the third year working for myself. While this year has been great at proving that this job can work and allow me to live the life I want, next year has to prove that it can be done consistently, and is able to grow in a way that is entirely manageable. 

All being well, in 2026 I’m looking to do more shoots, work on larger projects and finally realise some of my personal projects. 

For this, I feel very adequately equipped to be able to do the job, so if there are to be any physical improvements in the coming 6-months, I imagine they’ll relate to more power and more data. SSDs need to be bought, and more camera-batteries. V-mount batteries exist in my peripheral vision, and forking out a little to secure at least one of those with a mount is likely a must. That alongside a few more 1TB disks to keep the back-ups and storage secure. Meanwhile, the NAS kicks into gear doing the master backups. 

Should things go well, it would be nice to find opportunities while working with an APS-C sensor camera. That prime opportunity being to invest in a good super-wide lens, but that is more a nice-to-have at the moment. 

More than anything I’m looking to keep a steady-ship and stay afloat in the first half of the new year. Instead of needing to upgrade the equipment I’m working with, the better improvements are more likely to be in myself. 

Discipline will be the answer to my growth. Waking up earlier in the mornings, managing my time better, and keeping my brain good and active. A couple of good habits should allow me more time to take in work and complete it as good as I possibly can, while also allowing time to juggle that work with personal projects and ensuring my own work is also being completed. 

In completing that personal work, I have a tool to showcase more of my identity as a professional. Who I am, what I do, my style and the topics I’m interested in covering. All being well, that can shape the work to come in the future. 

There’s a separate blog to be written discussing my thoughts on social media and the “self-help guru” but it’s not here. Relevant to that topic though, in January 2026 I’m very interested in getting involved in Jocko Willink’s “DEF Reset.” 

With the hard work and discipline that entails, I’d like to think doing 4-weeks of that will result in some good habits I’d benefit from keeping throughout the year. My particular aims from doing this DEF Reset is to return to writing more, and outputting more work into my substack. 

Looking back at where I was after university, what was keeping me going was my blog and writing about subjects I was interested in exploring. With various life events over the last 5 years getting in the way, doing that has understandably fallen by the wayside. 

Writing more will allow me to re-explore my voice, and hopefully allow more direction in the future of my work. 

I’ll return in 6-months to report on how that all works out for me.