Marshall Street is a comfortably sized unit focusing on big campaigns, thereby giving as much attention as possible to each director's vision before contemplating its next creative project. In this way, Marshall Street satisfies both the director's needs and the company's finances in bleak economic times.

"We feel that it's vitally important to help with creative ideas throughout the whole process and give complete attention to a director's needs," explains Mayes. "We're in a good position as a company because we're small enough not to get hit by the present unsettled climate. We don't have to worry about 17 Avids in a big building - of course it also helps that the directors we assist are generally busy people."

"We never really feel the need to pile on the work here," adds Thornton-Allan on Marshall Street's work ethic. "We do one specific job before moving on to the next; when Fredrik Bond comes through our doors he obviously expects us to work solely for him."

The company continues to offer service to anyone on the map, presently busy working across Europe and additionally for the US market; Thornton-Allan will focus on a job in a couple of weeks in Italy (following his recent work in Paris and Rome) while Mayes is set to work on a job through Leo Burnett, Chicago for client Nintendo as directed by the busy-of-late Michael Geoghegan of Pink Films.

Recent work of note include Supernoodles "Car" and "Face Off," with agency-of-the-moment Mother, directed by Fredrik Bond of Harry Nash and cut by Thornton-Allan, and "News Gathering" for the BBC, directed by Michael Geoghegan of Pink Films and edited by Mayes, which received a Promax Gold Award and led to further Geoghegan-directed work including "Day in Motion" for the Chicago Tribune.

Recently, Mayes has seen a move toward dialog-driven material in the UK and senses a move away from commercials weighed down with heavy special effects.

"I feel that the UK is still stuck in the FX arena but it's been changing over the past year," explains Mayes. "The American sensibility of dialog and comedy has slowly been slipping back into the English marketplace, which is more challenging from an editing perspective; FX work is more about pacing and technique."

Thornton-Allan agrees that the London agency scene needs to supply well written scripts in order to stand out from the crop.

"When it was busy, agencies simply wrote basic ideas for particular a director to shoot, then put that footage against music and threw it out," explains Thornton-Allan. "Now scripts have to stand out and creatives have to get cleverer than simply making wacky pictures with music and special FX. Frederik Bond does dialog all the time; he stands out because he's good at directing dialog but he also picks creatives who are writing the best scripts, like [the one's at] Mother. I think that people have to return to the days when they wrote solid treatments - casting and good acting alongside a good script."