A Bit About Me

More than 30 years' involvement in video and educational TV production, with the vast majority of those spent as a freelance in an uncertain business has meant that I've always striven to learn new things, new techniques and new technologies. The whole business of mass communication has changed to the point where - thanks to high quality, low cost video together with YouTube, MySpace and the web as a whole - it's the "mass" that's doing the communication.

I've been freelance on and off since 1984, and trading under the name Colin Barrett Associates. I guess I ought to confess that the Associates bit doesn't mean a lot; it was added sometime around 1986 as a means of making a one-man-band resemble an international corporation, but of course it was (and still is) untrue. I'd left Chef & Brewer (then part of Grand Metropolitan PLC), where I'd worked as the company's Video Production Manager and overseeing corporate video production for training and general corporate communications, and I was keen to attract freelance business as a corporate and educational video writer / producer.

Of course, tagging the business with the word Associates could have also implied that was I involved other specialists in the process of media resource production for business and educational markets as they were required - and that's exactly how it's remained to this day.

Corporate video production services
During the late 80s and early 90s, CBA undertook a number of wide-ranging briefs from companies large and small - all of whom had a requirement for enhanced communication to either employees, clients and potential clients. Usually, the result of research, planning and script-writing resulted in video production for distribution on VHS or U-Matic cassette or - on occasions - via satellite. Those were heady days indeed!

Eventually, my experience with portable video-making technology which goes back to the mid-70s led to my being asked to devise and deliver training workshops for complete newbies to video; to that end I ran workshops for staff in local authorities (teachers, librarians, archivists, social & youth workers, etc) and also in some start-up SME's (small / medium-sized enterprises).

Writing for camcorder magazines
A contact with the editor of the UK's Camcorder User magazine (now Future Publishing's Digital Video ) led to a commission to write my first ever consumer camcorder review in 1997. This led to other contracts writing over 450 tutorials, how-to features and in-depth reviews for all of the UK's leading camcorder & home video magazines. I wrote a monthly column - Colin Barrett's VideoView - for Camcorder User for almost three years until I ran out of steam in 2004!

New Media projects management and training
After spending 4 years as a new media projects manager with The Open University, in which I oversaw a 9-person training and support team on the infamous CLUTCH Club project.

A published author, too!
On cessation of my contract with The Open University, I was lucky enough to have a project to jump straight into. Ilex Press, a UK publisher renowned for their superb books on the graphical arts and media production, commissioned me to write what turned out to be my first book. Four months solid work resulted in Digital Video for Beginners, which was published late 2004.

For full details of my published books, see this page.

SimplyDV: Camcorder Reviews, News and much more
It's with the website that much of my working week is occupied. SimplyDV now rates in the top three UK websites on Google searches for Camcorder Reviews in the UK and sits well within the Top 10 for similar searches in Google in the USA. The site is all of my doing and, as founder/managing editor and chief writer, it's been a very useful shop-window for my skills - both in terms of my writing commissions from magazine and book publishers, training workshop assignments and various other miscellaneous consultancy assignments.

Link: SimplyDV.co.uk

The Next Step
Where next? Well, there's a whole world out there - so who knows?