As the oldest of the ducks, I’ve seen more radical changes in both the technology and the industry itself than all the others combined. I joined Thames Television in London after leaving university, working on programmes like The Sooty Show, This is Your Life (with Eamonn Andrews in those days), and current affairs broadcasts. Live television taught me to stay cool in a crisis; there’s no second take when your work is being watched by millions.

I left for Manchester & one of the biggest corporate and heritage production companies just as VHS tape was transforming the market for video programmes. There was still no way to edit your own projects; you took your camera rushes with all the edits carefully worked out in advance to a specialist editing suite, editing to 1 inch video-tape spools. With time ticking away at £250 per hour, thorough and clear-headed preparation was crucial.

Then came non-linear editing on computer-based systems, and suddenly it was possible to set up my own production company without spending hundreds of thousands of pounds. We could have made cheap corporate videos (and there were some absolute shockers out there in the 1990s!) but being used to the high production values of broadcast television and the carefully planned workflows of prestige corporate and heritage presentations, I wanted Resolution DV to be known for its storytelling skills and client relationships instead.

But the biggest revelation was watching Dave and the Fuzzy Duck team create a motion-graphics project for us on Apple Macs: all the technical limitations of the equipment I had grown up with were now irrelevant; video, multimedia, photography and graphic design merging seamlessly, together with Resolution’s production experience, to tell the client’s story.

Phil Hewitt
Project Director