Podcasters' Emporium

One of the things I love about the new media space is the technology that is so readily available to create content. I now have hardware and software to produce both video and audio podcasts. But now, with so much ‘stuff’ I thought I needed more space.

So I went out to find other locations that would meet my needs and thought that I needed to pay a lot more money just to have the space to podcast and vodcast… the costs were going to be so personally restrictive that I decided to re-think the plan.

I started to drill down into the ‘what if we…?’ scenarios to see whether I could achieve the same objectives with more space. I was working on the premise that resource scarcity should not be seen as an obstacle but an opportunity to create. And create I did! So late last week I decided to invest some thought time in my studio to make the utility (and the space) stretch further than it had ever gone before.

My studio is no bigger than a single bedroom, and it needs to house at least two production engineers when not in use, and up to four seated guests for audio interviews. Cozy is a good word to describe it.

The big question was, how was I going to add studio lighting, a video camera and a chromakey wall into a studio that was already stretched to capacity. The additional challenge, as you’ll deduce from the diagram is that no corner of the room sits at 90 degrees meaning that no furniture actually sits flush into a corner.

The first thing I needed to do was remove all superfluous items. One of those things was a bookcase, full of books I never referred to. This gave me room to move a desk into the space left meaning that all my desks fitted across the back wall of the room, freeing up a full wall for chromakey, and creating a desk space for mounting a video camera and teleprompter screen.

The studio lighting at the moment is all on floor stands, with two on the floor and one positioned at the back of a wide desk. The position of the lighting provides coverage to the left and right of talent, with one positioned to blanket the chromakey wall.

The final changes to the room will be the installation of air conditioning to ensure a comfortable temperature when all the equipment is running.

The result has been a perfect one, and much better than trying to move house to achieve the same result.

Photos to come in the next blog post, and I will also outline the equipment I’m using, because that has changed over the last few months too.