Russell Blakeborough

Russell's combination of technical abilities and communication skills make him at home in diverse environments and allow him to maximise the use of technical expertise within an organisation. A natural communicator proficient in 6 languages, he focuses on open source communications technology.

Specialisms include Drupal, multilingual, media & taxonomy.

MA Natural Sciences (Cambridge)


Project Management - Software full product lifecycle & foundation of major open source project
Web Development - Drupal 4.7-8, (X)HTML, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP, MySQL, CSS, Flash/FMS/Red5, SEO, Analytics, CVS, SVN, GIT, Apache, Drush, internationalisation
Software development - PHP, Object Pascal (Delphi 1-6), C, C++, Lingo & Action Script on Windows, Linux & OSX
Languages - English, French, German, Russian, Spanish, Catalan, Italian
AV Production - Sony Vegas, Adobe Premiere, Virtual Dub
Live audiovisual performance - especially with his own software VJamm and in the VJamm Allstars, a live AV band

21 years commercial experience including:

Open Sounds - Musical composition social networking system for schools in the UK, Denmark, Italy, France and Spain.

School of Everything - High volume peer to peer web education system in Drupal. Cloud based with major new developments in taxonomy and semantics on release to Drupal contrib.

Energy Union - EU Intelligent Energy project in Drupal. 13 languages with complex AV editorial workflow.

VJamm - Professional AV performance software developed in Delphi. VJamm 3 is designed for ultra-low latency playback of video in live performance and studio environments. VJamm 3 is the only commercial software available to offer this level of performance and demonstrates cutting edge real-time programming techniques - The VJamm website is custom built inhouse in PHP - mulitingual - automatic online purchasing / key shipping system.

Gridio - Interactive AV installation commissioned by the Pompidou Centre and European City of Culture
- www.gridio.com

FreeFrame - Founding of major Open Source project - now the plugin format used by all VJ softwares
to share video effects - www.freeframe.org

PIXnMIX - Website production for Channel 4 Ideas Factory including a dynamic Clip Sharing system on the Creative Commons License (the 'Candy Jar').

Further Skills:

Systems Design, Development & Administration: PC & Mac - Windows, Linux, OSX - Apache, PHP, MySQL
Electronic Engineering & Design - particularly computer interface systems and RF control
Translation - general & technical documents
Graphic Production - Design direction, Photoshop, 3D Studio Max

2016

GLA Taxonomy
Working with the Greater London Authority to analyse and their taxonomy requirements and implementing a solution as part of the redevelopment of their web systems.

Virtual Post
Design and build of a custom media asset management and business process integration system for Virtual Post.

2015

Ecobee
EU cluster project with bilingual website promoting the dissemination of ecological building techniques between France and England. ecobeeproject.eu

British Music Collection
Major rebuild and redesign of the national contemporary music collection. - britishmusiccollection.org.uk Brightonart maintains the British Music Collection, and works with Sound and Music to develop new features and support the opening of the collection.

2014

BBC Connected Studio
Working with the BBC to develop new ways of classifying user experiences using the latest semantic technologies. The ‘I did it’ project interfaces between BBC web systems and the Tin Can LRS, providing semantic classification of content and experiences. Retrieval systems then allow the surfacing of this information to the public and BBC administrators.

GLA Taxonomy
Russell worked with the GLA to help the organisation overhaul the classification of its data. The project involved the interfacing of classic taxonomy tools such as MultiTes and WebProtégé with Drupal to provide a centrally managed taxonomy for use in multiple client systems.

2013

Active Wristband
BBC commissioned open source project to develop a system to link up real world events with online social networking technologies. Technologies involved: RFID, Raspberry Pi, Drupal

Open Sounds
Musical composition social networking system for schools in the UK, Denmark, Italy, France and Spain.

2012

Ecofab
Drupal system in English and French to allow knowledge transfer of Eco building techniques.

Vongplay
AudioVisual 4 track online jamming system using webcams to allow people to compose 4 track compositions around the world.

2011

Netsounds
Project management & deployment of new taxonomy & semantic techniques within the Netsounds EU portal.

Ch@tspace
A communication system for medical patients in English, French and Amharic.

2010

Taxonomy NCO
Onward development of semantic analysis and clustering techniques on Drupal. This technology now allows Drupal sites to easily add 'you may also be interested in ..' style links based on local taxonomy. Configurable dataset analysis allows community interests to bubble up automatically.

AV community systems
Project management of development of new techniques to allow users around the world to jam with AV content and create their own remixes.

VJamm HD
VJamm HD development to support video resolutions up to 8192x8192px with hyperthreading.

2009

School of Everything
Development lead on School of Everything, a peer to peer educational social networking system. RDF, semantic clustering, advanced taxonomy & notifications. Pioneering techniques in Drupal cloud computing to allow very low cost, reliable serving of high volume logged in traffic. Open source releases including nodetaxonomy_notifications and taxonomy_nco.

2008

Energy Union
A 3 year project funded by Intelligent Energy Europe, to raise awareness of issues surrounding Renewable Energy generation and energy efficiency. 13 language Drupal web system with complex workflows. - energyunion.eu

Brighton & Sussex NHS Trust
Development of a Drupal CMS system for the Claude Nicol clinic, staff training & handover to local developers & designers for onward development & maintenance.

2007

Community System for the Association of Visual Arts Production Centres of Catalunya
PHP-SQL open CMS framework with custom search facility to allow the centres of the association to maintain pages and HTML search information for public consultation - news publishing tools - image management - forums - calendars - www.xarxaprod.cat

Gridio installation at the British Film Institute - part of the inaugural events for the new BFI Southbank Centre.

2006

Dynamic 'superblog' CMS websystem for the Santa Monica Arts Centre, Barcelona
Pixel-perfect design of open CMS theme and custom components commission in PHP-SQL

C-Sides Festival - Jerusalem International Conference Centre - Grido Installation and VJamm Allstars performance at a major peace festival in Jerusalem - Custom AV production for the event - http://csides.net

Catalan Language Courses B1/2/3 (CPNL Generalitat de Catalunya) - http://www.cpnl.cat

Kingsbrook Language School Barcelona - Intensive course in Spanish - http://www.kingsbrookbcn.com

PRAXIS
- part of the Leonardo da Vinci programme - technical partner in the development of a model for future internet use in european educational establishments.

Hybridlab - Project Management and interactive design of a Drupal CMS dynamic website system for Islington Enterprise Agency.

VJamm 3
- Design and implementation of a new graphic interface for VJamm and major software release to coincide with the release of the Coldcut 'Sound Mirrors' Album which VJamm 3 appears on. Japanese added to
multilingual website. - http://www.vjamm.com

2005

Lecturing at Mataró University
- Barcelona - Lecturing and practical tuition in Spanish and Catalan as part of a course in live audio-visual performance. VJamm, FreeFrame and the history of AudioVisual performance - http://www.eupmt.es

VJamm 2.6
- Major version release of VJamm Pro drawing on 2 years of extensive testing, consultation and development since VJamm 2.5 - Reworking of the whole VJamm Graphic Image and bilingual web production of new
website. - http://www.vjamm.com

NESTA Creative Pioneer Academy
- Consultancy for the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts
- Creative Pioneer Academy mentoring as VJ Software expert. - http://www.nesta.org.uk

2004

PIXnMIX
- Major new website production for Channel 4 Ideas Factory including a dynamic Clip Sharing system on the Creative Commons License - the 'Candy Jar'

FreeFrame
- Now the dominant format for video effects plugins in VJ Softare, FreeFrame has become a major open source project. FreeFrame now boasts over 250 of the fastest video effects plugins around and is the only portable realtime plugin format. Most VJ softwares now support FreeFrame on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX

K[no]w Money
- A VJamm Allstars AV performance piece commisioned by the progressive Austrian think tank - the 'Grüne Akademie' in Graz. The VJamm Allstars is our 6 piece live audio-visual band where the instruments are VJamm and Ableton Live.

2003

GRIDIO 1.5 - Tunnelvisions - The new GRIDIO installation was commissioned by the Berg der Erinnerungen (Mountain of Memories) exhibition, one of the flagship projects of Graz03 - European City of Culture 2003.

VJamm Allstars shows - VJamm Allstars were invited to perform in the Dom im Berg at the opening gala event for the exhibition: one of the party highlights of the year according to many present.

VJamm 2.5
- Major new version of VJamm featuring OpenGL hardware video mixing and the best realtime performance on the market - VJamm has become the definitive AV performance software.

2002

GRIDIO 1.0 @ Pompidou Centre, Paris&MACBA Barcelona
- Moving VJamm and a/v samples into the art world, Gridio is a very interactive a/v installation which launched at Sonar, Barcelona, in May2002 then moved to the Pompidou Centre, Paris in October, running there until January 2003. Part of the Sonic Process' touring exhibition, the theme of which was the influence of music technology and production techniques on the visual arts.

FreeFrame
- Foundation of FreeFrame open video plugin system. Design, development, deployment and management of a major open plugin format in collaboration with partners throughout the VJ software industry.

2001

VJamm 2.4
- A milestone release for VJamm - for the first time now it was possible to MIDI sequence AV clips to a level of accuracy that allowed realtime audio visual composition (eg. of AV beats)

PirateTV CanDU tour of former Yugoslavia.
Non-profit 9-week tour of 20 crew, doing club/outdoor shows in 9 cities in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia. We took PA, all video gear, & stage. Climax was Coldcut gig in Belgrade with 1 member in UK, 1 in Belgrade and the live gig performed via a web-link using wireless LAN to beam into venue.

VideA_01.
Audio visual technology festival in Barcelona. Invited back to perform as VJamm Allstars. Fascinating opportunity to meet and work with other VJ software makers&users.

2000

AV Scratch
- Invention of Audio Visual scratching with full realtime pitch shifting of synched audio and video - AV scratch laid the way for a major new performance technique - combining technology from VJamm and DJamm (DJamm was Coldcut's live performance software of the time developed by AP of Camart)

VideA_00. Audio visual technology festival in Barcelona. Invited to perform with other UK AV VJs and DJs.

Reflets sur l'eau.
Collaboration with Jon and Maggie Pettigrew, Mark Scarratt and Jon Enkel (lighting&sound). Research/Development of non-linear generative AV QuickTime sequencing technology, and complementary non-linear editing techniques.

1999

VJamm Realtime Research Project
- After the success of VJamm Classic we embarked on a major research project, to produce a new VJamm codebase capable of to making a seachange in realtime AV playback.

GMOTV, Greenpeace field, Glastonbury.
Collaboration with Millie Young (Millimations) and JunkTV to run 4 day rolling filming/editing/screenings for 2 hour live/VT show each day, to highlight GMO issues.

www.piratetv.net - Began occasional AV webcasts from studio with Headspace and guests. Also involved in streaming media research

1998

Coldcut 'Let us replay' remix album. VJamm clip banks released on CDROM insert with VJamm demo and media from Coldcut and Headspace

VJamm released on Ninja Tune
- First public release of VJamm - the world's first AV sampler in partnership with Matt Black of Coldcut / Ninja Tune. This major software release was the culmination of a 3 year project to invent new techniques and make possible a new artform: AudioVisual live performance. 'VJamm Classic', as it has now become known, is still available on Ninja Tune - ZENVJAM1

1997

VRGGS
- Virtual Reality Guide to Green Solutions - pioneering VR photo walk-around developed in QTVR for the Centre for Alternative Technology with interactive 'click on this exhibit' dynamic linking into a database of information about green technology.

Visual Research and VJing - Visual performance experiments using 'Midual' software developed by myself.

Beginning of VJamm Project
- After meeting at Big Chill festival, formed working relationship with Matt Black (Coldcut/ninja tune/Hexstatic) to develop VJamm, based on original Midual concept, as 16-track AV sequencer/sampler for PC. Extensive research and development around PC based live AV performance - MJPEG hardware, PC AV systems optimisation, codecs, performance issues ... video production particuarly single video and a/v clips for live use.

1996

Mmmm
- Music video production and live event - 'Multimedia Marquee' stage at Cambridge Strawberry Fair. Dedicated Video production, 10 hours of programming.

Trans-Europe Halles festival.
- Performance at European City of Culture Copenhagen with Cambridge's Clueless system. Multimedia Club performance based on festival theme of 'work and time'.

VJing at clubs + festivals all over the country.

1995

Midual
- First versions of Midual - the precursor to VJamm. A first foray into realtime AV programming - Midual allowed performers to trigger an AVI clip from various frames using MIDI - probably the first ever live performance video sampler.

D-MAL - Drake Multichannel Automated Logging System
- Windows application providing front-end to satellite broadcast hardware.

Founded Camart Ltd