Building ITT Studios, our brand-new video recording space

For the past 6 years we have been recording video-based OnlineAnytime content in our original studio, which has served us well. In 2020 however we decided it was time to invest in a brand-new video studio, a space that would allow us to create new styles of video and enhance the learning experience for our users.

I’m Stuart, Mpirical’s Digital Media Manager, which means I work on all of our video productions. As such this new studio has been a big part of my life for the last few months and is where I will spend a lot of time. In this blog post I aim to give you a quick rundown of how we built this exciting new space…

In September (following delays due to the global pandemic and all our staff moving to home working) we took the opportunity to start creating our new studio. Local building contractors moved into our empty office and began turning three small office rooms into one large space. Walls came down, ceilings were replaced, new wall coverings erected, and a fresh lick of paint applied. After a few months of work, we had an amazing new room, ready to be converted to a studio.

After the builders moved out, we went in to start constructing a custom-made green screen, due to COVID-19 we had to do a lot of the leg work at this stage. Several of us put together the large frame for the screen (it was basically like big Meccano), only going wrong once… but hey, it was an easy mistake to make… honest…. It was then ready for a lighting rig to go up, something a few of us worked on over a day, and the green screen to be fitted, something I took on myself. Soon it was starting to look a lot like a studio.

It was then only a matter of fitting all the lights and bringing in the cameras. As part of our desire to advance our video offering, we invested in new 4K video cameras, which will allow us to provide higher quality videos for our users. This, coupled with our much larger green screen and filming space, will also open up a wealth of possibilities going forward… watch this space!

So, after several months of work by builders, electricians, and ourselves we finally had a brand-new working video studio, which we named ITT Studios (Innovating Telecoms Training Studios). Ready for a new year of fresh content and exciting development of our on-demand video-based telecoms training.

Watch the studio be built in super-speed in our time-lapse video covering construction to installation: