A year out with a camera.
Weddings across Norfolk, filmed and edited by Jonathan as a sole trader. The gap year that never ended.
01 / OUR STORY
It started with
a wedding video.
Then the road opened up.
Jonathan Thursby left Norwich School in summer 1986 with a place to read mechanical engineering at Imperial College. He took a year out first and spent it filming weddings. There was enough work to keep going, so he never took up the place.
Eastern Video grew from that one-man start into a production and facilities business. By the early 2000s it was at 7–13 Rose Lane in Norwich, with two edit suites for hire, with or without an editor, plus cine and video transfers, standards conversion, tape duplication, DVD authoring and sound and radio kit for hire.
The weddings stopped in early 1992 when the Top Gear work began. The corporate films, editing and local production carried on.
Edit suites and a transfer room.
Customers brought in rushes to be cut, old cine reels to be put on tape, and runs of VHS copies with labels and sleeves.
One name, three services.
The business ran as the EV group: production, post-production through EV Post, and specialist cameras through EV Special Facilities.
Where the other
businesses came from.
As the specialist camera work grew, it moved into its own limited company, set up in 1998 and now called Extreme Video. The oil-well cameras became a third business, EV Offshore, in 2000.
EV Offshore is a separate business. It was sold in 2024 and is not part of Eastern Video.
Each has its own story. Extreme Video’s site covers the camera projects and screen credits; JJR Holdings has Jonathan’s full career.
