It feels silly to say you’re a social media addict, doesn’t it? I mean I’m not walking around with my phone wrapped in a brown paper bag, one shoe missing and a beard that’s made up of equal parts facial hair and miscellaneous grime like the movies would suggest (I’ve always found that cliche so one dimensional). I’ve known addicts all my life, my Father with alcohol, his Brothers (my twin Uncles) with heroin. Even my Nan was a successfully recovered alcoholic. Addiction is in my blood (probably), but an addict to what exactly?

I too have been on a path of sobriety for nearly two years now. Alcohol was never a constant in my life, I didn’t rely upon it by any means, I could happily go months without a drink, however, whenever I did decide to have a drink, more often than not it would end in excess, and badly. This culminated in two awful experiences towards the end of 2024, one of which I ended up in a Spanish hospital at the end of a wrap party and the other involved me having to throw away a very expensive rug. The latter preceded the worst hangover I’ve ever experienced and at the end of that day I vowed never to have a drink again, and have since stuck to it.

But that wasn’t necessarily addiction, I wasn’t waking up thinking about drinking or finding excuses to drink. What I realised soon after quitting was that I actually have a problem with impulse control, as the old (Pringles) proverb goes “Once thou pops, thou can’t stop”. This wasn’t mutually exclusive to alcohol either, when I zoomed out it was prevalent in many aspects of my life, and now I realise social media was a part of that too.

So what am I addicted to?

Dopamine (I assume).

The lack of impulse is probably because whatever I’m relentlessly indulging in is giving me such a constant and steady hit of dopamine. And who doesn’t want an endless stream of the stuff?!

However, like everything, it comes at a cost.

Alongside my career as a filmmaker I’ve also always been a musician (a decade somewhere in the middle of my adult life spent doing it professionally) and I recently came to write lyrics to a song, and couldn’t. This is a common hurdle for songwriters and not one they should berate themselves over, some songs are just trickier than others, but this felt different for me. It wasn’t just that I was stuck, it was that every time I tried to sit down and write I would so quickly end up back on my phone again, scrolling away. The discipline of songwriting no longer gave me enough of a dopamine boost to hold my attention, and the lazy easy-to-reach endless happy factory (aka my iPhone) was always sitting neatly in my pocket. I even booked studio time with my band hoping the impending deadline would force me, like it did back in college, to get the work done. But it didn’t, instead I sat panicked on the sofa in the control room of said studio jotting down nonsense in my notes app until something stuck enough to use in the moment.

This was the rectangular shaped, glass fronted straw that broke the camels back for me. And it timed perfectly with a WhatsApp message from my good friend and co-creative mastermind, Joshua Halling, telling me he’s just bought a ‘brick’.

If you’ve been living under a rock (or sensibly and not endlessly scrolling on social media like I was) then let me tell you what a ‘brick’ is.

It’s a small expensive plastic cube (it’s also magnetic which this dummy didn’t realise and then proceeded to pay extra for the magnetic holder) which blocks a selection of apps of your choosing from opening once you tap your phone against it. You can then unlock the apps in the same way. That’s the general crux of it.

But Daniel? Why would you pay £40+ when you can just use a cheap app to schedule downtime on your phone? Or just simply delete the apps altogether?

Because - checks notes.

I. Am. An. Addict.

I need to retrain my brain. And I find ‘shame’ to be a brilliant motivator for change.

To delete all social media (as pleasing as that sounds) and disappear entirely from the internet might not be the most conducive thing for someone who:

A) Gets a fair portion of their work via instagram.

and

B) Is mostly creating work for those very apps (yes i’m aware of the irony in that).

However, that might just be the addict in me talking (kicking/screaming) to hold onto them, as I’m very much in the throws of active recovery right now remember. In fact as I write this it’s pertinent to mention that I am only on week two of using my ‘brick’.

Perhaps there is a world in which I can still progress as a commercial and music filmmaker without being on any of the social media apps, but I digress, back to the ‘shame’ component.

If I’ve tapped out of the apps and I’m sitting on the sofa, and I get that prang of hunger for additional dopamine, typically my thumbs would get me there without my brain even needing to action it. For example, I’m watching a TV show and I recognise an actor from something, my brain tells me to get the clever little device out of my pocket and go to IMDB to find where else I’ve seen the actor. A short and successful little side quest, but the addict in me makes sure I end up opening every single social media app I possess whilst the phone is in my hand. Before I know it I’ve checked out of the TV show and I’m now 30 mins (or more, usually more) into a scroll hole. But now my phone is bricked, if my thumbs go to click instagram (which they still do even though the app is clearly greyed out) I have to get up, walk over to my fridge (where I have my brick), tap my phone against it to unlock the apps and then go and sit down again, and the shame and unencessity of that whole rigamarole is enough to prevent me from doing it at all.

The hope is, after some time and practice, I can wean myself off the craving for endless and constant dopamine. To start being bored again, because it’s in boredom we thrive, it’s where creativity finds us and ignites our brains. I’ve kidded myself for too long that instagram inspires and motivates me, when in fact it does quite the opposite.

So here’s to a future where I’m a little more bored and a lot more intentional with my time.

Wish me luck!

That year was also a turning point in the film industry and I found myself at the forefront of it all. The Canon 5D MKii (and most subsequent Canon DSLR cameras) had entered the chat with their HD video capabilities, changing what was possible with big ideas and small budgets. At the same time MySpace (which combined social media with music) was on it’s last legs as everyone migrated to Facebook, leaving artists without a place to connect with their audiences. Cue ‘The rise of YouTube’.

This perfect storm of affordable consumer tech, a fresh video-centric social media platform and my being in the middle of a thriving musical sub-culture in the UK meant that overnight I went from a struggling unemployed filmmaker to a freelance one-stop-shop music video factory. I charged the first band I ever worked with £50 and doubled it every time a new band wanted to work with me until I landed at a figure that felt justified for the workload. I was running around the UK most days of the week, employing students to assist me so I could access their college kit hire for free, amping up the production value that far exceeded the near-to-nothing budgets I was given.

It was my second-coming of film school, where I got to experiment, play and hone my craft. Within two years I had made enough of a portfolio that I could finally approach major labels and pitch on music videos with actual production budgets.

For nearly ten years I called myself a ‘music video director’, at least 90% of my income came from making them. But, just as the status quo had shifted when I had first entered the film industry, another was about to happen.

Music videos were once the most important marketing tool for an artist, entire campaigns would often hinge on one golden piece of media that could make or break it. Today however, the audio-visual landscape looks very different… or does it?

Let’s rewind a second.

In 1894 Edward B. Marks and Joseph W. Stern produced ‘The Little Lost Child’ - A song that was promoted as an ‘Illustrated Song’, designed to be displayed using magic lantern projectors. It serves as one of the earliest instances of a ‘music video’ and prompted inventors such as Edison to discover ways to synchronise sound and image together. By the early-mid 1900’s music focussed films were appearing on screens across the globe with the likes of ‘St Louis Blues’ (1929) - a two-reel musical short film featuring Bessie Smith, and Theresa Brewer’s ‘A Tear Fell’ (1956) - often cited as the first “promotional” video for television. In the 1960’s The Beatles would go on to make several ‘music videos’ to avoid having to perform live on television whilst artists like Bob Dylan would use it as a platform to reinforce the messages within their songs. Music videos were becoming an increasingly popular format without a dedicated place to live. Then in 1981 MTV launched and changed the face of music marketing forever.

Throughout the 80s and 90s some of the most iconic music videos were created, propelling both new and established artists into stratospheric success, whilst deepening the lore and mythos that surrounded them. Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ (1983), A-ha’s ‘Take On Me’ (1986), Bjork’s ‘Human Behaviour’ (1993), Jamiroqui’s ‘Virtual Insanity’ (1996).

Of course, the ‘music video’ was born out of a consumer driven financial necessity, a way to ensure music still found a way to dominate and stay relevant when attention and media consumption had shifted from radio to television, but that didn’t mean it had to become solely a corporate tickbox exercise. On the contrary, music videos became symbiotic to the artist’s music, woven into the tapestry of their conceptual world building and synonymous with their personality and ethos.

The medium was also a breeding ground for new directors to find their voice, an incubator for rule breaking ideas that pushed the realms of what’s possible with a camera. Entire careers in cinema were born from the music video genre. David Fincher, Spike Jonez, Michel Gondry, Michael Bay but to name a few.

But in December 2025, MTV axed it’s music channels. A telling sign of where the public’s desire for the format was at.

So what happened?

My guess? A combination of things; The collapse of physical media sales and the rise of low-paying streaming services, consequently leading to smaller marketing budgets for artists; The death of music television channels; The dwindling attention spans of audiences, coupled with the over-saturation of visual media on social media sites, leading to a shift in audience-preferred ‘short form content’ and UGC (user generated content); And ultimately, a lack of ways to monetise the media itself. One could speculate all day long as to why we are where we are.

To say music videos are dead is an unfair and untrue statement, but they have quietly slipped out of the peripherals of mainstream audiences, and with it, their desire to seek them out (beyond the few that seep into zeitgeist through the artist’s global recognition).

In most cases record labels have demoted them to the term ‘visualisers’, an accompaniment to the slew of other content needed for an artist to be able to reach and connect with their audiences.

What now? Will we ever see a golden age of ‘music videos’ return?

I’m not sure!

Music videos will always exist, even now they are still considered a central asset in an artist’s campaign, however, budgets are much much smaller than they once were, making it difficult (not impossible) for filmmakers to break the same boundaries they once did through the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s and early 00’s.

But even as I write this filmmakers are finding new ways to create impactful art within the medium. The only difference now is the level of dedication and discipline it takes to achieve greatness. And there are some great things happening if you know where to look!

So how was it we were allowed to ignore (nearly) all of the above and create visuals for what would arguably become one the biggest tours of the past decade?

Let’s rewind and find out.

A year ago I posted my first (and ashamedly only) Substack article about my time on the road with Sam Fender during the winter of 2024. It was a reflective look back on why the content looked the way it did whilst I tried to simultaneously distill my creative methodology onto the page. The reason this is so poignant is because the work I made on that tour singlehandedly won me the Oasis Live ‘25 gig, and those same creative instincts continued to serve me throughout the entirety of this project.

Read it here.

When myself and Joshua Halling (Head of Photography) were brought in to the Ignition offices during the early spring of 2025 we had no idea what to expect. In fact no one did. This kind of once-in-a-lifetime-musical-cultural-phenomenon had never happened before. And is likely to never happen again!

One thing that was for certain however was the fans. No matter what happened on this tour, that was to be our main focus, and it gave us a clear jumping-off-point to base our research and initial visual concepts.

We presented many (many) ideas on how we could capture this tour and roll it out across the various social channels, and the ‘Postcards’ concept was not on any of our pitch decks.

So how did it come to be?

Though the term ‘Postcards’ was no-where to be seen, the components of it were. In particular this short video clip by Jacob Davenport to advertise his brother Elliott Davenport’s book ‘Back On Our Perch’ was a big inspiration -

We analysed the reason why it resonated with us so much and found it was because it represented an extraordinary moment happening in amongst the mundanity of the everyday, a breach in the status quo for something significant to take place. Meanwhile this one singular static frame carries the ability to tell you everything you need to know about what’s going on; the towering football stadium, the red smoke, the fans trying to get a glimpse. It’s both beautiful and poignant in the same breath.

In fact football became a huge inspiration for us. From Joshes own work with Manchester United that observed the generational side of the fandom.

To excerpts from Elliott’s book ‘Back On Our Perch’ that placed the camera in amongst the chaos and excitement of a rare cultural event.

Initially, the plan was to embed this inspiration into the visual tapestry of the recap films/after-movies. However, it quickly became apparent that these montage films might begin to lose their potency if released back-to-back, and that a palette cleanser might be needed to offer a different perspective of the same gig.

The tour began in Cardiff on July 4th 2025 and our core team grew to include filmmaker Jay Davison and photographer Harriet T K Bols (we would also bring in additional creatives to bolster the film/photography teams for select shows across the tour).

Cardiff sped by like a hurricane, and with it only being two shows there wasn’t a lot of room for us to experiment.

Cue Heaton Park, Manchester - Five shows spread out over nine days. We knew we’d want something fast paced and energetic to sum up the initial two shows that fell on the first weekend, and that there’d be a more substantial recap film to follow at the very end of the block. That left a question mark for the gig that fell in the middle, and it presented the perfect opportunity to try something new.

POSTCARDS.

We’d already seen plenty of interesting characters and unique moments across the first four shows and we knew finding them with the (yet untitled) static-portrait technique would offer us a clear visual juxtaposition to the hectic handheld recap edits that were now circulating online. We also learned that the third Manchester show was going to have a reduced capacity, and in our minds that meant it would likely be a lot more chilled compared to the first two full capacity events (disclaimer - it was no less chilled).

I can’t remember exactly at which point we decided to bring the term ‘Postcards’ into this project, but I can remember the creative who first inspired it.

Daiki Shinomiya was the very first person I’d seen use the term ‘Postcards’ for his travel/tourism films way back in 2024. He was a part of a wave of travel-based filmmakers who created a trend online using this word. However it wasn’t something I’d seen done on the same level and with the same discipline in the live music industry.

On the lead up to the tour a mutual friend of ours Charlotte Alex had released a short online film for the artist Sigrid called ‘Travel Day’, which was comprised of static vignettes, and reminded me of how powerful stillness can be. Because of this we brought her in to help us on the first day of trying the ‘Postcards’ concept in Manchester.

Harriet had also created some lo-fi static vignettes at Parklife Festival which boosted our confidence that this concept could work for the Oasis Live ‘25 campaign.

We learned a lot from our first attempt at the Postcards format, what worked and what didn’t. But I think what surprised us the most was how much it refreshed our enthusiasm for shooting the show. Typically we’d run around for two hours straight trying to make two or three filmmakers feel like a multi-cam team of twenty. Postcards allowed us to really slow down and wait for the moment to happen in front of us, rather than creating it through frantic camera work. It was a game of patience and if you waited long enough you could strike gold.

Of course none of this would’ve mattered if the fans didn’t respond well to it, but after the initial post dropped it was evident that this was exactly what they wanted to see. Every extraordinary moment we captured seemed to resonate, both with the fans who attended the show and the ones who weren’t able too.

What became a way to break up a five show block was suddenly as high a priority as the main recap films themselves. Double the work for us, but with twice the reward.

As we continued to roll them out across the tour we began to perfect the content, both conceptually and technically (more on that in a moment).

Here are some of my favourites -

THE TECHNICAL.
”Hold your breath, and hope for the best” - Daniel Broadley

I’m sure it’s common knowledge by now, but we didn’t use a single tripod for any of the Postcards throughout the world tour. Moments would unravel around us in a fraction of a second and we’d need to react even quicker to get a pleasing composition, from there you would just have to hold your breath and hope for the best, remaining still enough to give the illusion that the shot wasn’t done handheld.

To achieve this we would use the strongest In-Body-Image-Stabiliser (IBIS) setting possible in the camera itself, as well as further stabilising the clips in Davinci Resolve (where we would also edit and colour grade them). Did it work every time? No. But when it did work it was nothing short of amazing to see shots pass of as if they were captured using a tripod.

Occasionally we wouldn’t be able to stabilise a clip and either let it go out with some visible camera movement, or simply save it for the recap edit where the movement fitted aesthetically.

The curation process was done by our captain, Sarah Mansfield (Head of Creative at Ignition) who oversaw the entire campaign. Near the end of the tour myself and Jay took over whilst she went on annual leave and I can confirm that it was no easy feat trying to narrow down and curate it between Oasis, Noel & Liam’s social channels.

On a good night we would deliver somewhere between 40 and 60 Postcards each, on a bad night 30 or less. Bare in mind, only 30 in total would be uploaded between the three channels, that’s a lot of culling.

A lot of people asked about our choice in 4:3 aspect ratio and why we decided to then deliver in a 16x9 container with black bars either side. This was a conscious decision, a huge part of the campaign was marrying the nostalgia for the band with something more modern. The 4:3 aspect ratio is synonymous with the early career of Oasis and the media that represented them at the time, from music videos to live performances. Something about seeing the black bars either side enhances the feeling even further.

Furthermore it was so un-native to the social media platforms that it then became unique to Oasis. Even META enquired as to why we weren’t prioritising an aspect ratio that the algorithm favours. But when have Oasis ever pandered to what someone else expects of the? Everything has always been their way, on their terms, and it felt like we should be making the same decisions for the online content that was going to represent them in this new age of social media.

FINAL THOUGHTS.

The postcards concept reinvigorated my love for filmmaking (dramatic, but true). I’ve been so swept up in trying to create a feeling or an emotion through camera movement and editing these past few years, that I’d forgotten what it was like to simply stand still and take it all in through the lens.

I’m glad it resonated not only with fans of Oasis but with other creatives alike, who’ve since adopted the concept as their own and found unique and interesting ways to use it in their own work. It was never mine to steal, so keep standing still and waiting for those magical moments to unfold in front of the lens, I hope it grants you the same joy as it granted me throughout 2025 as I gallivanted across the globe with Oasis.

I’m not someone who came from a ‘live’ background, though I’d be lying if I said I was a stranger to the stage. For the past decade-and-a-half that I’ve been getting paid to hold a camera, there have only really been a handful of opportunities to join artists/bands on stage (you’d typically find me in a film studio or on location making music videos instead). However, whilst I was building my career as a filmmaker I was also touring the UK and Europe as a professional musician.

I have a deep love for music and a profound respect for artists that are able to authentically express themselves on stage, and Sam is one of those artists. I first connected with him in 2018 when I directed his VEVO DSCVR live session, but we didn’t cross paths again until 2023 when I was invited to shoot his seminal performances at St James Park stadium in Newcastle as part of a much larger team (Curated by Nial Lea).

Since then I’ve shot nearly every show he’s done, but this December was the first succession of shows that weren’t ‘one-offs’, and it certainly came with new challenges.

How do you keep things interesting? Unique? Different? Especially when the production and the set (largely) remain the same?

I don’t necessarily think there’s a straight answer to this, but I believe it becomes easier when you shift the focus from ‘documenting the artist’ to ‘capturing the feeling the audience are having’.

How can we translate that euphoric feeling into something visual? I think the first thing we have to do is ditch the notion that this is some kind of formulaic check-list of angles and shots. When the audience attend a show (providing it’s the first time they’re witnessing it) they’re willing to be surprised, to have songs they weren’t sure they were going to hear being played, to have production elements unexpectedly shock and dazzle them, even their vantage point will often be unexpected and unplanned.

The camera has the ability to mimic that same naive wonderment if we are willing to relinquish our own creative safety net. There may be obvious places to stand and capture specific moments in the set that will no doubt give you the best possible view of them happening… but is that the place to best evoke the feeling of them? How are the audience experiencing those moments? They’re probably not up in the centre of the balcony seeing it all perfectly symmetrical. So, should we be? Is the moment even more spectacular if we deprive the viewer of that ‘perfectly framed’ version of the it, and instead opt for something in-and-amongst the action, where the view is obscured but the energy around you is palpable in the frame?

*Dan shrugs at his own questions.

I can’t profess to know whether this is the correct way to approach any of this, as I said before, I really haven’t done this enough to have some perfectly formulated strategy that can work for every artist and every show. But, I can tell you that it feels right to approach it this way.

Our creative-gut is our most valuable tool when it comes to capturing in a documentary sense, and we have to trust it. If we spend too long asking ourselves whether we should try something with our camera, we’ll likely miss the moment all together or simply end up capturing a version of it that doesn’t actually reflect any of the sentiment the artist originally intended for it to have.

Our tools can be a big part of this too, or perhaps the absence of tools. I purposefully restrict myself when capturing content by choosing old, banged up, vintage manual focus glass, which technically reduces my focal range options during the show, but it’s in that restriction that I creatively thrive, because it forces me to move and find the moments. And where the lenses lack in sharpness and reliability they make up for with their unique characteristics and imperfections, adding a painterly quality which combined with the energy of the camera movement can create a unique visual manifestation of what it feels like to be at a Sam Fender show.