Building a custom podcast set

This is the podcast set for one of my clients who just finished recording his first season with us. He's quite happy and decided to sign a contract for a second season 🙌

This is great news for us because it means 12 more months of guaranteed income. The only request our client had was that he'd like to give his set an upgrade. Of course, we complied and came up with some ideas for the new set.

This is part of the presentation I made to show him some ideas for the new set. He gravitated towards the leather chairs and lamps on the bottom right.

This meant it was time to go shopping for some chairs.

When I found something suitable, I delivered this final concept:

I decided to cover the walls with black curtains, but due to budget and time constraints, I needed to make the curtains myself.

THe first thing that needed to be changed was the Persian rug. It's amazing how much dust these things accumulate over time. It's been a year since we last had them deep cleaned and this is the current state of things.

Step 2 was to purchase some black fabric. Lots of it.

I went down to the fabric store and purchased enough to get some nice curtains made in the future. They will be DIY curtains for now.

I needed a way to hang them so I went down to the hardware store and bought some PVC pipe.

Plastic PVC is a bit flimsy, so I couldn't have the curtain hooks too far apart. They needed to be close enough to where they wouldn't bend with the weight of the fabric.

I found a sweet spot at around 1.5 meters and one of us started cutting PVC while the other installed the hooks.

The process of installing the makeshift curtain rods was quite straight forward: drill hole, hammer in a dowel, screw in the curtain hook.

Pretty soon things were starting to take shape.

The lighting was not perfect on the wide angle camera because of the LED sign, but we already adjusted the intensity of the sign plus the ISO on the camera. I'm quite happy with how the closed shots came out though. Upcoming episodes will look much better.

Overall I'm quite happy in how our custom podcast set came out. We're starting to develop a nice relationship with suppliers and I think I'll be able to build more complex sets from now on. In fact, I have a new one coming in a couple of weeks.

I'll update date you soon!