The Above Average Adventures of an Average Man: Episode 2

The Making Of A Lockdown Music Video For The World’s Biggest Virtual Festival, What It Feels Like To Perform To An Empty Room When Thousands of People Are (Virtually) Having It Next Door To Fatboy Slim and The Power of Saying Yes And Working It Out Later

The brilliant team behind Shangri-La at Glastonbury are responsible for saving W*A*R*S (We Are Red Stars) and preventing OneCor from taking over the Beautiful Future universe completely. If you have no idea what the hell I am on about then consider reading Episode 1 first. Or just dive straight in.

The W*A*R*S band, DJ collective and crew of party-starting, OneCor-baiting sonic renegades, punks and misfits (that’s me and about 60 slightly insane mates behind Beautiful Future – our immersive, alternate reality story) were gearing up for summer festival action and the launch of our new Rebel Disco club night, when covid-19 arrived to smash us around the lids. We were hunkered down on board the Nautilus Sniper Submarine to sit it out when we received a transmission from our Shangri-La comrades. It was an invitation to be part of their audaciously ambitious Lost Horizon Festival – a global reaching, 2-day music and arts festival they were building from scratch in partnership with US social virtual reality innovators Sansar and VR Jam. Their idea was to curate a virtual festival environment based on the real Shangri-La field and their iconic Gas Tower at Glastonbury, featuring exclusive visual artwork and performances from some the world’s biggest DJ and electronic music acts. The event would also raise funds and awareness for The Big Issue and Amnesty. We were honoured to be asked back, having hosted a W*A*R*S secret venue in Shangri-La at Glastonbury 2017 (an adventure I will spill some beans on in a future episode). Their six week lead time sounded insane but we knew these guys could pull it off because they are literally some of the most talented creative producers in the world.

Unlike the other music acts on the bill who filmed their sets in front of a green screen and were then placed into the virtual environment to appear in 3D, we were programmed on to the SHITV Stage to appear on a giant 2D TV screen inside a virtual room. This suited us as it meant that we could retain creative control of our visual production and it also worked nicely with our narrative – the illegal broadcast of a live W*A*R*S gig beamed in from the Nautilus Sniper Submarine’s engine room.

Entrance to SHITV stage inside Lost Horizon Virtual Festival

Red Star 16 aka Seize, introduces our SHITV broadcast from the Nautilus Sniper Submarine - W*A*R*S music studio and party HQ

In keeping with the jump-first, think later approach I have practiced since day one of the Beautiful Future project, I said yes immediately - with no consideration of people’s availability, costs, logistics, practical feasibility or timing. I can’t take this approach in my day job where I work to a brief, look at insights to spark an idea, consider strategy, KPIs and creative solutions to marketing challenges and then methodically work out what the delivery of that idea, campaign or content looks like. Not so with Beautiful Future. Comparatively, it’s bloody anarchy and I love it. “Yes” is a word I find very easy to say because I have a lot of excitable energy for things that inspire me creatively. But I used to find it scary. This project and being surrounded by creative people that are way more talented than me, has given me the confidence to just go for it. I still have the attention span of a gnat for things that don’t interest me but now I tend to go at something 100 miles per hour like a mad man with laser focus to make it happen - if that thing really grabs me. Sometimes the result is good. Sometimes not so. Sometimes it leaves me exhausted. Often it gets me into trouble with my wife, who calls me Tas after that manic Tasmanian Devil cartoon character. This was another Yes Tas moment.

Red Star Tas Devil Laser Bum

By the time our Lost Horizon set was confirmed we had less than 2 weeks to make it happen. Once we’d sorted a venue, coordinated diaries, worked up the risk assessment and worked out what we needed to do, I realised we would have 4 days within that time frame to shoot, edit and deliver it. What followed was a monumental effort on the part of each band member to get the music and visuals ready. Whilst we had been performing most of the material live since the previous summer, we had none of it properly recorded and mixed. There was our new vocalist Red Star 52 aka Lauren Hudson to record but she was in lockdown in another part of the country at her parent’s house. Red Star 77 aka Ben Maxfield (Electronics) had just had a baby and was in lockdown at his house. Red Star 08 aka PW (Guitar) is a lecturer at a music collage and was on the verge of exhaustion, up to his eyeballs marking papers. So Lauren's vocals were recorded under a duvet (makeshift vocal booth) on her laptop (with PW engineering via Zoom) at her parent’s house and Ben set up an extension to our real stage in his studio at home. We then used a small green screen at one side of our stage set to feature Ben and Lauren on some of the tracks. Rapper James Pike (amazing talent) was off the radar (James, where are you man? Get back on the sub!), so I disguised myself and stood in for him (we used his vocals, I just wore a hoodie and provided some vibes in the shadows). Thanks to Red Star 18 aka Angus Wilson (Keyboards), Ben and PW, an album's worth of music was recorded, edited, mixed and mastered ready for the shoot in a matter of days – and on top of their day jobs. Massive props to these Red Stars, it was an amazing effort to get it together under the circumstances.

Red Star 05 aka Sam Zindel in rehearsal at The Factory Live for Lost Horizon Festival. I've never seen his actual head

The location for the shoot was The Factory Live in Worthing, an independent studios and venue where we also rehearse and host our Rebel Disco club night. They were fantastic and very generous with the space. Helpful and enthusiastic throughout, the venue team supported us to make sure the shoot could go ahead safely. We lathered ourselves in sanitiser and configured the stage so that we were set up 2 meters apart for most of the set, utilising both the stage and the floor in front of it. Our W*A*R*S outfits are hot at the best of times, knocked off Chinese fighter pilot helmets with visors down tend to bake your brain. The addition of protective face masks made it an in-body sauna.

Creating the W*A*R*S stage set at The Factory Live aka The Nautilus Sniper Submarine….

Behind the scenes of the W*A*R*S band and the wider Beautiful Future project, I run a studio called Dead Good - a multi-disciplined team of creative mates that come together for special projects. A bit like a multi-media Art Attack version of the A Team, maybe. Although I feel more Murdock than Hannibal. Our Director of Photography, Red Star 55 aka Alan Stockdale and Lighting Designer, Red Star 70 aka Zach Walker also perform in the W*A*R*S band - Alan on drums, Zach on sonic art (live visuals that include projections of vibrating liquids on a bass speaker canvass triggered by our bass and beats. Zach sets up his magic in the middle of the stage where traditionally the drummer would be). Not only are they super creative talented chaps, they also have all their own kit (kit list for the nerds at bottom of article) so we were able to make it happen on literally no budget, thanks to them. With no crew but ourselves (minus Ben and Lauren who we would add in post), we shot the footage in segments with Alan and Zach taking it in turns to film each other. We recorded 8 songs, each with a unique lighting design and different set-ups, over 2 days with a 2-hour production window for each song. It was totally manic and very tight but we pulled it off. Just. Alan then worked at break neck speed over 48 hours to edit the film into the final piece. He is an amazing film maker and editor (not bad on the drums either), check out his company, Foundlight. Zach is a master of light and projection, check out his work at Zach Walker.

A behind the scenes video just for you (smashed together on my phone while writing this article). Includes the slider you can slide up and down….

We were programmed onto the SHITV stage at Lost Horizon Festival as the headliner (or last, depending on how you see it - which was fine by us because we were just very happy to be involved). Sat in our respective locked down houses, we waited up until 2am to watch the show. Unless you had a hard wired VR headset and laptop with a decent graphics card for the full VR experience, there were 2D streaming options and I found that Beatport worked best for me. It was fun watching all these massive DJs performing in a virtual Shangri La. I would imagine that VR would have been really impressive because the Gas Tower and other main stages were amazingly detailed and absolutely banging. The artwork – pieces that you could click on and actually buy – were great with some world class ShangrilART artists like Stanley Donwood, Alice Skinner and Dan Hillier showcased. Back on the SHITV stage our set finally came (I was under a duvet with a lemon and ginger tea by that point, the authentic bad ass sonic renegade that I am) and the band all jumped into Zoom together to share our big moment. Then our hearts sank and my 43 year-old dad-in-a-band ego stung me on the bum. The room was empty. Next door there were 5,000 people (or avatars) going nuts to Fatboy Slim (or it might have been Eats Everything by that time, I can’t remember now). It was a strange feeling. As a central part of the Beautiful Future world we have created, the W*A*R*S band has only performed on our own stages in our own packed venues at music festivals or at our own club night. This was our first excursion away from that. Being in a virtual festival you are essentially one click away from your potential audience - or an empty void. After a few minutes of ego bashing we were then pissing ourselves at the irony of us each sat in the dark, literally on our own, watching ourselves perform virtually on our own, to an empty venue, on our laptops. After a few more minutes we jumped back to The Gas Tower and into the virtual rave mosh pit, leaving our sorry virtual selves behind.

Good evening world, We Are Red Stars! Oh......

A 7-piece electronic story driven concept band from the near future with a rotating line up who make dance music with sonar, have a cement mixer disco ball for a frontman and broadcast their gigs from a hijacked nuclear submarine piloted by a mad Frenchman - might not be every music fans cup of tea. If our blend of house-tech-disco-hip-hop-pop-indie-something-else doesn't make you want to shake your hips then this subsurface dance floor is not for you. I don’t suppose we will ever be invited to support Radiohead but we did bump into Wayne Coyne (a wonderful human and Original Red Star Material) at Bluedot Festival and he seemed quite endeared by our red vibrations. At least he did until 20 of us blagged our way past security and onto the stage for the Flaming Lips encore in full W*A*R*S outfits covered in disco lights and rave paint (more beans to spill on that in a future episode).

The opening track from our Lost Horizon Festival set is an instrumental called Revolution 909. It was gutting that Ben who wrote it couldn't be there due to lockdown so we added him in post onto the green screen to perform virtually within a virtual festival - I think thats right, right?

This tune is called Cover Your Tracks. It's about a hacked OneCor drone called IZZI who is looking out for a young, lost Red Star. Lauren recorded the vocals under a duvet (DIY vocal booth) at her mums because she was in lockdown and couldn't get to a studio. Like Ben, Lauren shot her footage on her phone and we added them to the green screen in post so they could appear on stage with us…

Despite not finding an audience at Lost Horizon Festival, I am really glad we were lucky enough to be involved because it’s an exciting platform with loads of potential and if they do it again next year we would love the chance to be part of it again. More importantly, it made us push on and create something during lockdown when everything else around us was being cancelled - and that ultimately was what the festival was all about. It feels good to know that we said "yes" again and made another seemingly very difficult thing happen. The output is a 35-minute concert film and an albums worth of music (or it will be with a couple of remixes to add in!) that nobody has seen or listened to yet. Before we put it out there officially, we are taking another pass at the video edit to work in some of the footage from our web series and festival activations. I want to present this in an original, exciting way and we are working on what form that will take. If you work in music, gaming, film, immersive tech or entertainment (or something else) and you like it and have an idea for it, then maybe we could have a chat. Be warned though, I might well grow horns and say yes.

Missed episode 1? Grab a brew and catch up here

Lost Horizon Festival - W*A*R*S shoot kit list for the nerds:

Sony FX9 camera - A Cam

Sony G Master lenses

Sony A7RII - B Cam

Atomos monitors

Kessler slider and second shooter motion control unit

Manfrotto 635 FAST Single Tripod

Manfrotto Carbon nano stands

Lastolite green screen

Rode mics

16 X 1m Showjockey LED DMX Lighting Bars

8 X .5m Showjockey LED DMX Lighting Bars

2 X 400w Wookie RGB Animated Laser

1 X 5k Panasonic Full HD Projector with .08 lens

1 X 2.5k Acer projector

1 X Visualising Vibrations Sculpture - Live Cymatics

1 X MBP running Resolume

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The Above Average Adventures of an Average Man: Episode 1

From Glastonbury to TED to Boomtown to The World’s Biggest Virtual Music Festival via a Live Stream Gig on a Nuclear Submarine – How An Average Middle Aged Man and His Mates Made A Big Idea Happen.

Unless you happened to have come across it in a festival field, club night, conference or stumbled into it on social media, you won't have heard about this before. The only time I publicly shout about it is when I am in disguise jumping around on stage wearing a knocked-off Chinese fighter pilots helmet and rave paint or lambasting the Sleaford Mods on Twitter as the CEO of an invasive tech company (both of these guises will be explained in due course). I have felt too self conscious to write about it because it is unfinished, imperfect, a bit silly and might not be perceived as any good by people that I admire and respect. This thought fills me with paranoia because in my day job (I work in creative communications as a creative director) I try to project myself as insight driven, strategically smart and business focussed with shiny, successful case studies to impress clients with i.e. a professional grown up.

Since being furloughed, I have had time think about facing this fear. It has dawned on me that sharing this thing that has consumed me creatively for the past five years might be a good thing for 3 reasons; I am looking for a new job and maybe it could open up some conversations, the project thrives on collaboration and maybe someone will read this and jump on board and when I stand back and look at it objectively I realise that for some people it might be an inspiration to help them make their own idea happen.

The experience has been life changing and there are many above average adventures I could share about it another day, if you are interested. I'll begin with how it started and how it came to be.

Beautiful Future

Beautiful Future is a story that I wrote while day dreaming about what the world might look like when I was an actual adult. This was almost 20 years ago, when I was just an adult. Alone with my thoughts, Nokia in pocket, Gorillaz Plastic Beach on my ipod, not a Facebook friend in sight. A time Before Sci-Fi was hijacked by Super Heros , when satire could be identified as an definable genre and parody meant 'not actually real’.

It is a story about a Corporation called OneCor, led by their CEO Gordon Romance, who take care of our needs and desires at the expense of our freedom. Citizens are rewarded for compliance with social scores and lifestyle upgrades, their behaviour monitored and evaluated via a LifeAID in the arm*. All music and art is sponsored (and a bit crap) and unsponsored content (the good stuff) is outlawed with offenders sent for ‘rehabilitation’ at a OneCor facility called The Reflection Village (not like Centre Parks).

*Years later, OneCor's flagship product (it is not actually real, this is all make believe) would be launched on stage at TEDx

In protest at the data harvesting, hyper-neoliberal governance of OneCor, an alliance of 'sonic renegades, punks and misfits' rise from the Box City slum in the shadow of OneCor's glittering New Estates to resist the regime and unite the people. They call themselves W*A*R*S which stands for We Are Red Stars. These Red Stars are not a communist political movement. They are a band, DJ collective and crew of visual artists and party starting rebels that use art as their weapon. The Red Stars wear disco-pimped military fatigues in the field and red boiler suits and rave paint on stage. They evade OneCor by conducting operations onboard a stolen nuclear submarine called The Nautilus Sniper, converted into a music studio and party HQ. Their weapon of mass construction is a sonic canon armed by the W*A*R*S band and designed to knock OneCor spy satellites out of the sky. No blasters or light sabres here. Still with me?

The Nautilus Sniper Submarine - W*A*R*S music studio and party HQ

Franklins Bar in the Box City slum where W*A*R*S perform on stage while their crew recruit like minded souls in the back room

[Concept art by Red Star Kris Turvey]

Fan Boy Antics

My influences for Beautiful Future were 1984, The Prisoner, Blade Runner, Grant Morrison's The Invisibles and Jamie Hewlett (Tank Girl and Gorillaz). Charlie Brooker was a few years away from the first episode of Black Mirror when I conceived OneCor and Gordon Romance, but I loved his parody website TVGoHome and characters like Nathan Barley. The idea of creating something ridiculous but believable, really appealed. Marrying that up with sensational but almost conceivable technology felt exciting. I’m not informed or clever enough to have envisaged that China would actually one day introduce OneCor’s social scoring of citizens (I guess a lot of smarter people probably did see that coming). I'm not proclaiming to be a Charlie Brooker master story teller or some kind of George Orwell futurist genius. I was just a science fiction fan boy making stuff up, remixing some of these guys stories and putting my own spin on things, for my own amusement.

Gordon Romance, Global Citizen & OneCor CEO. I nicked his name from a mate who used to make up favourable fake quotes from the NME for his band posters and sign them as Gordon Romance, which I thought was hilarious. Now I put his name to articles on Medium.

Rebel Music Makers

Music was a central part of this weird world I was dreaming up. Back then I was the singer in a band called Black Mariah and writing songs like Paranoid Nation and They Got the Guns that riffed on the themes of Beautiful Future. It was important to me that W*A*R*S were creators and makers, not soldiers and killers. Their war with OneCor was fought sonically using music and art, the central Red Star characters were all artists and inventors. The name Beautiful Future I nicked off of one of my all time favourite bands, Primal Scream. It is the title of one of their albums. Years later, one of my mates became the partner of Martin Duffy (Scream keyboards) and I had the surreal experience of revealing this to him after she suggested that I should tell him about the project. A super lovely down to earth chap, he was cool with it and even gave us some of his own music for the project, samples of which will feature on the W*A*R*S first album in 2021 (reminder to self, I need to clear this with him).

W*A*R*S Ritchie Badlands - disowned by his disappointed parents as a young boy, the bass players extraordinarily long arms were an early design glitch for OneCor's Pharmababy program. [Concept art by Kris Turvey]

A Bit Bobbins

After designing the world, characters and drafting several chapters I ended up with an incoherent, rambling journal of words, logos, crappy sketches and unfinished ideas that did not match up to the grandeur of this 'big idea' in my head. Substandard, wannabe novelist stuff. It gave me some ideas for songs and penning a few lyrics but would have been a pretty bad book. I needed help to develop the idea, to turn it into something worth telling people about but I didn’t have the balls to share it with anyone for fear of ridicule. I felt like Marty McFly "What if they say I'm no good? What if they say, Get out of here, kid. You got no future. I mean, I just don't think I can take that kind of rejection". So I buried it for the next 15 years.

Bobbins early sketches [By me]

Then What?

This 90 second video describes what happened next as a bridge to the second part of the adventure below.

So, if you watched that then you know that I have been living out my Beautiful Future dream for the past five years thanks to Propellernet (an amazingly supportive and progressive employer) and a crew of incredibly creative thinkers and doers made up of a growing collective of the most talented people I know. Some I have worked with for years in our day jobs creating campaigns and content for brands. A few of us collaborate alongside this as dead good studio. Some I have made music and performed in bands with over the years (some are now in the W*A*R*S band with me). Others I have met along the way as a direct result of the project and they each bring something unique to the group. Their collective skills include music, script writing, film, photography, design, illustration, animation, creative tech, set and prop building and even radio show production. We come together to design, build and host our immersive festival venues and parties, co-creating experiences which have given us memories and friendships that will last a lifetime. The most enjoyable part of putting Beautiful Future into the real world has been to witness this amazing level of collaboration with these brilliant, lovely people - original Red Star Material, all of them (even the OneCors).

W*A*R*S crew chilling backstage at our Secret Compound in Glastonbury

Another successful W*A*R*S operation, this time hijacking the OneCor keynote presentation at TEDx

Gordon Romance, OneCor CEO, delighting his fans at Boomtown

Sally Smiles, OneCor Head Of People, unimpressed with this citizens Social Score

W*A*R*S on patrol outside our secret compound at Kendal Calling Festival

Steve Baker, Head of OneCor Communications, exhibits the OneCor LifeAID at TEDx

Red Star 02 deploys the W*A*R*S Sonic Canon at a OneCor spy satellite overhead

Resist, Rise, Unite! W*A*R*S cast on the set of our web series

Red Sparks (W*A*R*S Junior Squadron) prepare for the party at Bluedot Festival

Red Star 16 aka Seize, recruiting citizens to join W*A*R*S via our Time Travelling Disco. *Strictly no OneCors

W*A*R*S live is a 7-piece electronic band. I lose half a stone every time we do a show thanks to the helmet and boiler suit. We perform with visors down so I regularly fall of the edge of the stage, too.

Red Star 0880 aka Jem Drogan, leading tactical operations at Kendal Calling Festival

Red Star Joe Meredith aka The Profound Gardner - we found him in a field and he's become our spiritual pied piper. *Top of OneCor's Most Wanted list

W*A*R*S character illustrations by Red Star Sam Williamson

Red Star Lauren Hudson is one of our singers in W*A*R*S. She is amazing but will only perform if the world's largest disco ball is on her rider, which is problematic on board a submarine

Being Gordon Romance on Twitter is fun but can also be exhausting as I can never let my guard down. Steve Mason is the most engaged famous person which is amazing to me because I have been a massive fan of his since The Beta Band. He's even on one of my original mood boards as an example of what W*A*R*S are all about. Most people end up getting it but a few have blocked Gordon including Neville Southall after Gordon identified him as a high ranking Freemason - which is of course a ridiculous thing to say if you know anything about Neville, which I do because I think he's bloody great. Neville, if you somehow read this, please unblock Gordon and go give him hell. We need more Red Stars like you

Our first show was in 2015. We created a boutique music festival in the French Alps and convinced 250 guests that the organisers had been bullied into sponsorship by OneCor energy drink Alpine Milk. On the final night of the event, 20 flare waving Red Stars appeared from the forest, hijacked Gordon Romance's closing presentation, handed out diffraction glasses and saved the party with a blistering, bonkers DJ set. This DJ set-up would later develop into the W*A*R*S live band but we still have a 15-strong, in-character, DJ sound system now, spanning multiple genres of 'rebel music'

[Film by Red Star Alan Stockdale / Foundlight]

After a shaky production build (which I will spill the beans on in a future episode), our W*A*R*S secret compound at Glastonbury 2017 became the must-find venue of Shangri-La. Even Bez and Radiohead stopped by to evade OneCor surveillance.

Yoda v Jawa

Our collective enthusiasm, energy and sheer blagging with conviction has opened doors that I can’t quite believe. Try pitching this thing to a room of heavyweight music festival organisers who have never heard of you or your daft story, as you sit there in a Disco Lid (Red Stars standard issue helmet), visor down, and ask for their trust and budget to build an ‘immersive-theatrical music venue in the form of a secret compound from the near future’ in their field. The video below cracks me up. It shows mine and Sam’s faces immediately after our first meeting with Boomtown - the gods of immersive festival making and the Master Yoda to our Junior Jawa when it comes to their know-how and experience. It should be noted that Sam Zindel (Red Star 05, W*A*R*S bass player, my partner in crime) has run record labels, played in bands and is the MD of an award winning marketing agency. He is renowned as calm personified but look at his face (and mine, to be fair) as we suddenly crap ourselves at the enormity of what we have just let ourselves in for. We have all been totally out of our depth at times but belief and hard work has pulled us through and we have had an absolute blast along the way.

Red Stars 06 aka Rogue Leader (that's me pouting like Little Mix) & 05 aka Sonic Joyrider (that's Sam) - both of us looking a little more self assured on patrol with the Mobile Micro Rave Sound System.

The Current Day

Just prior to lockdown and the cancellation of summer music festivals, we had been looking forward to a return to Boomtown with a new OneCor venue and launching our own immersive club night. The W*A*R*S band and DJs were set to perform on some of the biggest stages in the land and we had finally planned to screen our web series – a theatrical mini movie telling part of the Beautiful Future story. Then coronavirus happened so all plans were put on ice. W*A*R*S hunkered down on board the Nautilus Sniper submarine to record a mix tape for CALM while OneCor launched IZZI to report low scoring citizens breaking social distancing laws and Felicity to take high scoring citizens minds off it all.

W*A*R*S Rebel Disco - our immersive club night at The Factory Live where the audience can go down a rabbit hole into the Beautiful Future story - soundtracked by music from the W*A*R*S band and DJs [Date rescheduled due to Covid, next event will now take place on 15th May 2021, fingers crossed]

OneCor Superstore at Boomtown 2019 showcased 12 lifestyle upgrade products, a Brand Ambassador recruitment centre and a hidden store room - the Boomtown Hackers secret hideout - which festivals Maze players had to bribe their way past OneCor security guards to access. By night, W*A*R*S broke into the superstore to host an off-the-grid party with secret DJ sets and midnight performances from the band.

Back in the real world, with physical events cancelled, people started to get creative in other ways as virtual events and live streams suddenly became the thing (if you didn’t see The Streets live stream, it raised the bar and has really inspired me to think about what we could do with W*A*R*S while playing live is not possible). What started as a summer of disappointment became a summer of opportunity, firstly with OneCor playing a leading role in Boomtown’s Area 404 ARG (Alternate Reality Game) and then shooting an exclusive W*A*R*S concert film for The World’s biggest virtual festival, Lost Horizon Festival that drew a global audience of 4 million.

We are now using that concert film, our web series and festival activation footage to create our debut W*A*R*S album - the format for which I want to feel new, original, exciting and immersive. We have the music and the content done but haven't fully nailed the idea or the platform yet. I'd love to pitch it to a computer games company and reimagine the story as a digital-first world from which the characters, band and music then break out into real world for exclusive, immersive events before going back in again. In keeping with the rest of this sprawling project, our approach is experimental and non-linear. It's like creating a puzzle but making the pieces first rather than the full image and then using those pieces to create the final artwork. This approach feels fun and abstract but sometimes it's maddening. The end result will either be genius or a bit shite. What I love about this is that it's the complete opposite to how I work in my day job where the brief and idea are precise and results driven. With Beautiful Future I get to be an artist with no agenda, experimenting as we go.

We filmed and edited an exclusive W*A*R*S concert film in just 48 hours for Lost Horizon Festival on a bill that included Fatboy Slim, Eats Everything and Peggy Gou.

Things I Have Learnt On This Nuts Journey

The best advice I have ever had is to surround yourself by people that are more talented than you. Beautiful Future ensures that I do just that. Things I’ve learnt so far on this nuts journey:

1. Fear stands between the mundane and life changing experiences

2. Embracing your ego is good for self-confidence and self-awareness i.e. as a reminder to be appreciative, kind, not a dick

3. Dare to show the unfinished stuff, it's the process that is often more interesting to people

4. Be brave, dig in and and do the graft so you can leave a legacy for your kids to be proud of (memories over money)

5. Dreams are things you cant' be bothered to try and achieve

You Actually Read This Far?

If you would like to see behind the scenes of some of our above average adventures, like exploding beer kegs and stranded comrades in desert heat at Glastonbury, a knee-deep-in mud-near-catastrophe at Kendal Calling Festival, a non-stop 48-hour mid-lockdown video shoot for the World’s largest virtual festival and some other very near misses (and hits) along the way - then keep this frequency clear for more incoming adventures.

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Fighting Furlough Fatigue with The Big Buzz Off

The good thing about being furloughed is having more time with my family. I love that we are together so much now. Although being a home school teacher to two housebound hooligans (now on summer holidays. Phew.) was…an experience.

The worst thing about being furloughed is that I very quickly began to miss work. I get frustrated and irritable unless I’m constantly busy having ideas and making things. I worried about not being at work which then made me feel guilty about getting paid for not working. I needed a project to fight the furlough fatigue.

Depression is a consuming, always on illness that has only intensified with the impact of lockdown. On my 4th week at home I saw a shocking stat from suicide prevention charity CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably) who experienced a record surge in demand for their suicide prevention services with a 37% increase during the first week of COVID-19 lockdown alone. We have a history of mental illness in our family. My aunt attempted suicide a couple of years ago and we very recently lost someone this way on my brother’s wife’s side of the family. Suicide is the biggest killer of men under 45 in the UK.

This compelled me to think, what could I do to help raise awareness of this and put my time at home around teaching the kids (which soon regressed to marshalling their Xbox addiction), to some use? My five-year-old gave me an idea. “You need a haircut dad”. I was suddenly aware that the whole nation needed a haircut. In fact, people were so desperate for a haircut that they were already doing it themselves (Google searches for hair clippers was up almost 400% YOY in April 2020) and so, The Big Buzz Off was born. 

I challenged myself to write a pitch for CALM, build the campaign and launch it - within a week. 
With some stubborn minded determination, a lot of pent up furloughed energy and pro-bono help from my Team Furlough comrades at Propellernet, Dead Good Studio and Zeitgeist, we went for it.

At breakneck speed and with none of the typical client red tape to navigate, we got the charity on board (an amazing team of hugely dedicated, lovely people), worked with the sublimely talented Alex Bamford to produce the creative, harangued Twitter (who were fast to reply and brilliantly generous) to secure a media partnership, got W*A*R*S to create a barbershop mix tape on board their submarine, approached New York band We Are Scientists to support the campaign with the release of their new single I Cut My Own Hair (thanks to our good friends at Zeitgeist), created a DIY music video featuring the band and some of the participating public and recruited CALM ambassador, Love Island winner and barber Kem Centinay to create a buzz cut tips video – with the content hosted on a Big Buzz Off hub page.

Over 600 people took part raising £12,000 to fund 1,500 potentially lifesaving suicide prevention calls. The campaign also generated awareness through high social media engagement and PR coverage including BBC 6 Music, The NME and Metro.

It was great to have been able to do something positive with my time and really fun to collaborate with such a fantastic bunch of people. I am already planning a follow up idea for CALM and hopefully we can raise further funds and awareness for their vital services during what has been an incredibly difficult time for so many.