A gap year.
A camera.
A business that kept going.

The gap year that became a career.

I started Eastern Video in summer 1986, after leaving Norwich School with A levels. I planned to take a year out before studying mechanical engineering at Imperial College. Instead, I began filming weddings and earning money doing something I enjoyed.

The business took off and I never went to Imperial. What was meant to be a gap year became the start of my working life, and I never looked back.

My school friend Scott Bedford designed the first logo for Eastern Video Services. He made a camera out of the letters EVS, with headphones hanging over it. I haven’t found a copy of that first logo yet, but it belongs at the beginning of the story.

A new logo. A different kind of filming.

When I started working for Top Gear in early 1992, I redesigned the identity around EV and the triangular motif. I stopped filming weddings as television and specialist camera work took over.

The job became much more than pointing a camera. We built the mounts, power supplies, controls, microphones and recording systems needed to keep cameras working in cars, on boats and in places ordinary equipment was not designed to go.

From Eastern to Extreme.

As the work grew, I began working with Bernie Ecclestone on WRC and Formula One. It seemed sensible to put the business into a limited company, and that became Extreme Video.

From 1993 to 2004, our minicam work covered the World Rally Championship, British Rally Championship, British Touring Car Championship and offshore powerboat racing, among other events. Each brought a different engineering problem, but the aim was the same: get the camera where it needed to be and bring the pictures back.

Eastern Video had begun as my sole-trader business. Extreme Video became the next chapter in the production and specialist-camera work.

The same roots, a new industry.

In 2000 I created EV Offshore. We kept the EV identity and added “Offshore” underneath, carrying the same name and engineering approach into another business.

Our experience of getting cameras to work in difficult conditions opened up another possibility: seeing inside oil wells. The surroundings were different, but the challenge was familiar. Build the complete camera system around the job it had to do.

A name that travelled.

When Lime Rock invested in EV Offshore in 2010, we rebranded to EVCam. Later, the oil business shortened its name to EV. Those businesses grew from the same practical camera engineering that had started with filming weddings and television.

The later EV identity used by the oil business.

EV today.

The work keeps moving.

The production story continued through Extreme Video and Epic Studios, alongside new ideas in camera technology. I left my principal role at EV in February 2025 and worked as a contractor after that.

Eastern Video remains the beginning of the story. The same curiosity still runs through the work: understanding a problem, building a system and finding a way to make it happen.