Why Voxiferi ?
When I first left school in the early 1990s I trained as a fledgling journalist with a small magazine in South London. It was 1991 and I was somewhat green around the gills. I spent many months mentored in editorial in a busy newsroom, writing stories and running round London on tube trains covering events. And then trained technically in all matters graphics and layout by a master of his field, Dick Jones, he of Letraset fame. The genius who invented so many of the typefaces we take for granted now every single day. It was a true baptism of fire for an eighteen year old who grew up being taught to type aged nine by Clifford Haigh former editor of The Sunday Times, and influenced by my uncle who was then features editor of The Evening Standard. Impossible shoes to even contemplate filling. I’d grown up living over the back fence from Kate Adie’s adopted parents in Tunstall in Sunderland, my Dad having gone to school with her when she was small, and having watched and listened to her my entire life, she was also a massive influence and massive part of my growing up.
My family being very media centric (my cousin Sonia Jessup for example, presents BBC London News every night on BBC 1 London). As a young teenager, my father had brought me home VHS video cassettes from the company Video Arts. That institution, founded by Sir Anthony Jay and John Cleese, won award after award for their fantastic training output delivered via VHS video services. Their output, still going strongly today, trained tens of thousands of people across the globe in how to manage, how to work with people and how to get your message across in corporate and public environments. They were irreverent but extremely useful tools that I lapped up, watching so many of their videos and trying to learn as much as I could to prepare me for adult life. Media, and being different in how we approach problem solving using media was now a critical part of the toolkit I was developing even in 1991.
So in summer 2008 I had sat down with Tina Firrell and fleshed out the basic concepts of innovating message and content via a different medium, with YouTube being so new to the internet, but having been acquired by Google a couple of years earlier, ideas came thick and fast. We toyed with the idea of using video, but with production costs so high and the cost of equipment being simply out of our range it was a non starter. But there had to be another way. A way of doing something that was different and that could get our content in front of a mass audience.
Around the same time I had been listening to Kevin Smith the creator and film director who was starting to look to use audio as a tool. He had taken part in a radio show with Edgar Wright in 2006 that I had heard, and then started a podcast series, Smodcast, with his partner Scott Mosier. I had moved home, was living alone and became hooked on their weekly output. His mantra fast became, just like how anyone with a movie camera could produce a film given budget and ambition, the same went for radio and podcasting. If you had a microphone and production chops you could produce a show.
Weeks later I found myself one summer evening in Bristol, sat one on one with John Cleese. We were in a private room at Clifton Zoo, yards from where a young John Cheese (as was) had boarded as a school boy. So having the chance to talk to John, I asked him what he thought about the concept of podcasting. Specifically what his take was on the opportunity of broadcasting without censure. He was methodical, he spoke with clarity and he was supportive of what I told him I planned to achieve. Having told him how I’d grown up watching Video Arts he was clear how the YouTube paradigm could, and would change how we would consume video and how it would be a game changer. He was honest to point out that he struggled to see, how if YouTube had existed in the 1980s, how Video Arts would have got off the ground. But that podcasting was going to be the most important media creativity tool for a generation. But to be wary of following any fad or trend. To strive to be utterly different in every respect. To think first about the listener. For that supportive advice I am forever grateful. To have that special time with someone who had won over business audiences and millions of fans for decades was inspirational.
So roll forward to 2012, sat in Boston, Massachusetts, with a microphone in front of me. With no script and someone about to hit record, the reality started to creep up on me that I was about to do something new and important. Something that I’d actually been preparing for since those early days in a newsroom in South London. I was hooked. From that came recordings sessions in Portland, San Francisco, NYC, London and even The White House in Washington DC. All learning my chops, which now defines Voxiferi. But to then build a business ultimately funded entirely by the tax man ? That took clarity of planning, but also to show that even in Rachel Reeve’s Britain we could be business enablers, funded by her department. The irony would make even John Cleese proud.
Dick Morrell, Founder