Workshops and bespoke training for in-house teams
Hands-on video training for communications, marketing, and editorial teams. Run in London, across the UK, or online.
I run workshops and bespoke training for teams who want to make better video themselves. The sessions are practical rather than theoretical, built around the work your team actually does and the kit they actually have. I've been teaching digital film for over fifteen years, including extended stints with General Assembly, where I taught digital film and video for marketers and communicators, and Cambridge University Press, where I worked on the Learn English with Cambridge YouTube channel. I've also spoken at industry events on storytelling, sustainability, and how filmmakers fit into a digital environment that keeps shifting under everyone's feet. Most of what I teach comes out of work I've actually done on commissions, not material lifted from a curriculum. The book I wrote, The Video Effect, is a useful sense of where the thinking comes from.
What the workshops cover
The sessions are built around the decisions that make video work or fall flat: story, framing, light, sound, pace, and the editorial judgement that pulls it all together. The exact mix depends on the team, but most workshops cover some combination of:
Story and structure. How to plan a piece so the edit isn't where the problems get discovered. The thinking behind this draws on craft and on research into how attention and emotion actually shape what audiences remember.
Camera and framing. What the shot is doing, why it's doing it, and how to make small kit punch above its weight. This is also the territory of mobile-first production, where the rig matters less than the editorial intent behind it. I cover the practical side of building a budget mobile filmmaking rig over on The Video Effect.
Lighting and sound. The two things that separate amateur from professional faster than any camera upgrade.
Editing and pace. Cutting for meaning rather than for length, and recognising when a scene is finished.
AI tools, used honestly. Where they help, where they don't, and how to use them without losing the thread of the work. I've written in detail about where AI fits for smaller teams and where the trust line sits, and the same thinking shapes how it gets taught.
Formats that fit the platform. Short-form, long-form, vertical, horizontal, and the practical differences that decide whether something gets watched.
The work happens on the team's own kit wherever possible. Smartphones, mirrorless cameras, whatever's in the cupboard. The point is to leave with skills that survive contact with the day job, not to admire equipment that won't be there next week.
Who I work with
The teams I work with sit inside communications, marketing, editorial, education, or internal media functions. Some are starting from scratch. Others have been making video for years and want a sharper editorial eye, a more efficient process, or a serious conversation about where AI fits and where it doesn't. The workshops scale either way.
Past trainees have included in-house communications teams, working journalists, marketing producers, and content teams at organisations that already have proper kit and proper budgets. Several have gone on to run their own YouTube channels, lead in-house production at their organisations, or take on more ambitious editorial projects than they thought they were ready for. The format adjusts. The principles don't.
How the sessions are structured
There isn't a fixed package. Every workshop is built from a short brief: what your team currently does, what they're being asked to do next, and where the gap sits. From there I'll propose a shape, a length, and a price.
Most sessions run as one of three formats:
A single intensive day, useful for teams that need a fast lift in capability across a specific area.
A multi-day bootcamp, where we go deeper across the full pipeline from brief to delivery.
An ongoing arrangement, where I come in periodically to work with the team on live projects as they happen.
Sessions can run on site at your offices in London, on location elsewhere in the UK, or online when that suits the team better. The choice is practical, not ideological. Where the brief calls for it, I've taught on location in difficult conditions: I've filmed and trained in Kenya, Mexico, across Europe, and back in the Caribbean where I grew up, so a one-day session in a Soho meeting room is not where the limits sit.
Why this is worth bringing in-house
Most organisations don't need a film crew for everything they make. They need one when the work has to land at a particular standard, and a team that can handle the rest themselves the rest of the time. That's the gap the workshops are designed to close.
The teams I work with usually find that bringing video capability in-house pays for itself fairly quickly, not because in-house work replaces commissioned production but because it stops the wrong jobs going to the wrong place. Big launch films, brand work, documentary projects: those still want a proper crew, and that's what DevilBoy Productions is for. The same practice has delivered work for clients including ICE (NYSE), Royal Holloway, the Westway Trust, Freshworks, VSO, RE/MAX, and the Service Desk Institute. Beyond that, I've shot for major brands and broadcasters under agency banners. This is work I can speak to in conversation but don't list publicly out of professional respect for those agency relationships. Day-to-day social, internal comms, event recap, talking-head pieces, training content: those are jobs an in-house team can own outright once they've been shown how. Workshops are how teams get there.
Get in touch
If you want a sense of how I think before getting in touch, the blog is the best place to start, particularly recent writing on AI in production, ethical use, and what changes for commissioning brands. Otherwise, the best place to start is a short conversation about what you're trying to do and where you are now. Send me a message with a sentence or two about the team and the kind of work they're producing, and I'll come back to you with some options.