Man who 'wasn't that familiar with Liverpool' now runs unique studio in city

A man turned up in Liverpool knowing little about the city and ended up running one of its most innovative businesses.

Chris Holmes, 47, from Wavertree, arrived in Liverpool 20 years ago with knowledge of only one thing the area is well known for. He told the ECHO: He said: “I'm originally from Blackburn. I moved to Liverpool in 2000. It was one of those things where I had a job interview. I wasn't that familiar with Liverpool. I’d been to the football. I just kind of turned up."

“I was like, this is amazing. I moved over within six months and then have stayed ever since.

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Chris is now the managing director of Transmission Studio. You probably wouldn’t come across the studio unless you were looking for it. It’s tucked away amongst the many units that make up the Brunswick Business Park in Liverpool city centre.

But this studio, with its use of green screens and virtual reality, can be used for just about anything, from work calls to live TV. A green screen stage is located on the ground floor, while a team of technicians in the studio upstairs create a mock environment as the backdrop.

The virtual studio features broadcast quality lighting, a fixed gallery, remote production facilities, a green room, a dressing room and catering space. It has already been used for a number of projects including a global conference for a Premier League football club.

It has just started hosting monthly music gigs called On the Dock acoustic sessions. Merseyside’s emerging musicians, using green screen to provide a virtual stage for emerging artists to showcase their music to a global audience which is broadcast live on TikTok for free.

Chris said: “We were working with a TikTok music channel called Be Awesome Music Television, and it was an idea that we've had for a long time.

“It was a great way of getting some up and coming Liverpool bands and artists to perform and obviously stream it out on those channels to create some really nice looking content.

“We'd seen similar things as well - Spotify do some green screen sessions and things like that. So that might be another avenue that we kind of combine the virtual production element with the performers to create kind of really unique looking videos and things like that.”

Last week's debut of On The Docks features talented local musicians including The Kowloons, Fiona Lennon, Harry McKenny, Paul Askew, Tasha Carlee and Nat Kelly.

Chris says this venture into music represents an important step for the studio and hopes the studio offers a dynamic twist on formulaic, virtual work meetings. He said: “We've been doing live streaming since about 2014 and obviously during the pandemic, teams and zoom calls really kind of took off and exploded.

“But we've been looking to try and take things to the next level to make them more interesting, because I think quite a lot of people are quite bored of live streaming calls. We did a lot of virtual conferences during the pandemic and we'd see people sat on those calls for hours on end.

“We were trying to kind of take it to the next step. So the virtual production, the green screen studio, is an evolution of that really.”

Chris feels Liverpool has made him who he is today. He said: “I kind of turned up as a young account executive in a PR agency, and through working with people, I've kind of personally evolved and developed and grown, and then obviously now a business owner.

“It's quite exciting. The potential is there for anyone to do something similar. There's no real barriers. And I think Liverpool is a great community of creative people to kind of do that with.”

More information is available here.

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