HISTORY
First Light Video was created in 1993 by Alistair Kerr with the help of the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, which provided meagre financial support and some unforgettable lectures on business management. A short time later, Alistair blew his life savings on a state-of-the-art non-linear editing system, one of the first affordable ones on the market. That system, D/Vision, eventually disappeared thanks to the superior marketing of Avid. As Alistair recalls:
'Producers were phoning me up asking if I had Avid. I said I had something better, because it was better than some of the low-end Avids at the time, but they weren't interested. Avid had become the hoover of non-linear editing, not just as a brand, at the time it also sucked.'
The D/Vision was housed in a leaky room within the offices of London Electronic Arts, a funded facility supplying video production and editing to the arts community where Alistair had learned his trade and even worked as acting facilities manager for a while. Eventually, after giving many of Brit art's finest their first taste of editing on a computer (which could also run 'Doom' at incredible frame-rates), LEA became Lux and moved into swanky new buildings in Hoxton Square.
The lottery money used to re-equip the post-production facilities was generous enough to buy several Avid suites, so Alistair began a new journey into a lifetime love/hate relationship with the very system that had made his redundant. The D/Vision, with it's awesome 9GB SCSI RAID of Micropolis drives (which ran hot enough to cook a full English breakfast on), was dismantled. Rumour has it that the ActionmediaII capture card from it is mounted in clear resin in Alistair's shed.
Eventually, First Light Video got a bijou office of their own in Hoxton Square. Final Cut Pro moved in, Avid sat in the corner looking glum but he takes it out for a spin now and then. The clients? Well, some of them have been coming back for 15 years, some of them became the kind of friends who's weddings you go to - even without a video camera.
As the man in the film says, 'That'll do pig. That'll do.'