Just finishing the pickup shoot from a feature I’ve been working on in February and March. Lovely to see everyone again, but it means missing out on a shoot I’d have loved to make...

BBC Worldwide have put another fun little promo video my way: the launch of Something Special magazine, which accompanies a CBeebies show that my daughter loved between one and two years old. It features Justin Fletcher, the benevolent godfather of CBeebies, who does a Lee Evans-esque clown character called Mr Tumble.

Their launch event was yesterday, just when I was shooting pickups for the feature, so I had to send a cameraman along with my camera, and today I’ve been editing a short promo from the resulting footage. Would have loved to go in person, as Mr Tumble would be the only performer I’ve worked with who my daughter would actually have heard of. A missed opportunity for genuine street cred with Cambridge toddlers. Bugger.

At least Alice watched the short promo edit once I’d finished it, and said “now can I watch a long one, daddy?”. Which I think is a good review; you should always leave ‘em wanting more. Unfortunately, as I’m off to finish the feature pickup shoot, I’m having to be kindly bailed out by my partner in Logical Media, who’ll finish editing the longer Mr Tumble epic...

Did a really nice day’s directing for BBC Magazines today, shooting an intro video for the iPad edition of BBC Good Food Magazine with a cameraman friend of mine.

It’ll be available in the new year. It’s the first iPad magazine I’ve seen in detail, and it looks great. And I’m a sucker for these sort of gadgets anyway...

I do hope that tablets like the iPad enable the magazine and newspaper industries to survive in the future. A journo friend was explaining to me recently that if, as a freelance writer who isn’t Charlie Brooker or some other celeb, you earn 25p a word, then there simply isn’t time for investigative journalism with proper research if you want to pay the mortgage. So you get Wikipedia-researched “comment” columns, recycled Reuters/AP items, or press releases.

If iPad papers put circulations back up, maybe there’ll be a bit more money around for quality writing, instead of some magazines just printing celeb press releases and stills as if they were stories.

It means we have to be willing to pay properly for papers again, though. We all ditched print papers because we could read the news for free on the websites, and when papers charge for their website, we just go elsewhere. I hope iPad/tablet magazines are attractive, convenient and cool enough that we’ll pay proper money for them, and they can pay journos to write the good quality stuff they’d like to, if only they could afford to.

Well, it's been a busy old year, with lots of time hanging around doctors, partly for another minor op on my arm, but mostly shooting for the NHS, which culminated in a day with Sir David Frost. Lots more interviews with researchers, hearing about the prospect of new treatments for cancers, type 2 diabetes and more. Always exciting and interesting to shoot with people at the leading edge of their field.

Also delivered the 5 training videos I was writing and directing for the University - on time and on budget, despite all the other stuff going on (like sudden trip to El Salvador in the middle of my edit time!) so I'm very pleased. The exceedingly bright people I was working for said they found the process of shaking all the ideas into tight scripts and then executing them exhausting but exhilarating. Which is a nice way to describe any good day at work, doing this job.

This last few weeks have been exaggeratedly hectic, as we've just moved house. It's a nice quiet cul-de-sac, just outside town and easy to get to, and it's hopefully the perfect spot to build a studio in 2010. We'll get things drawn up as soon as possible in January - hopefully a perfect, acoustically treated studio for film/video mixes and voice recording... and possibly we'll fit the band in at some point too.

Amid the mad scramble to finish everything before the weekend this week, I had the pleasure of seeing Andy from Bruizer again, on a nice, straightforward little job for the NHS at the Duxford conference centre. Needless to say, had to dive out and take a picture of some planes even though I suspect that's not strictly allowed...

Busily trying to shoot the training videos I wrote last week at the moment. Finished a loooong shoot day in Cambridge, and I'm being sent to Coventry again tomorrow with m'colleague Neill to finish the "live-action" shoot. Bits of animation and screen-shots yet to grab.

It was also the screening of Wasted, the teen drugs and alcohol awareness film I did some work on earlier this year, this week at Cambridge's Arts Picturehouse. Pete had done a great job cutting it, and the kids in the cast and youth workers were all justifiably proud of themselves.

A very short notice directing job this week, making a ten minute case study film for the national Community Languages Show, about kids at a Birmingham school who are taking exams in their parents' native languages. What effect does it have for a child raised in England to have their knowledge of Urdu recognised with a qualification?

Fascinating shoot; the teachers at the school we filmed at were generous with their time, and the kids fought their shyness to say some very upfront and interesting things. I'm off to edit it pronto now...

I’m currently working with a Cambridge artist on assets for the effects shots in Last B&B. I’m hoping to get temp effects created with the art assets (meaning textured drawings of buildings etc) so that I can give FX artists a clear idea of each shot’s requirements.

Anyway, even though we’re only looking at still images at this early stage, it’s really exciting to see some frames of the film with a bit of fairy tale apocalypse in the background...