Several years ago the main permanent set in our television studio was falling apart. Our news desk, which had been given to us by a Columbia station a couple of decades before, had a broken top. The background flats were crooked and beaten up. Nothing really matched, and everything looked beaten up.
In the Fall of 2015 I finally had enough, and started working on a redesign plan. I drew inspiration from all kinds of sources, notably the set galleries at Newscast Studio. I was also helped when two friends, at NBC and CBS respectively, invited me to visit them in New York; the hours I spent wandering with them through 30 Rock and the CBS Broadcast Center gave me no shortage of ideas, both for the studio and other areas. You can probably figure out the “shelf” piece is directly stolen from CBS Studio 57 (where CBS This Morning originated back then), and those familiar with New York will probably recognize the desk as a knock-off of the WNBC news desk used in about 2014 or so.
Most of what you see here was built by me during December 2015. That’s how I spent my December break, working alone in an empty studio. (It was actually fairly relaxing. Leave me alone and I can work miracles.) Almost all the materials came from our local home improvement store. What looks like brick is actually that “gaslight” brick paneling, but repainted to brighten it up. The “mortar” is tile grout that was applied over the painted “brick.” I spent a whole day working on that. I don’t want to do that again. The desk was built in my garage and brought in when everything else was complete; it’s plywood and MDF with cherry veneer and a half-inch Lexan top. It doesn’t sound like much, but it worked out nicely. (You would be surprised by how things you see in studios on television look when you see them in real life.)
There have been minor changes to the set since this picture. We had to strike it in late 2018 when the studio ceiling was stripped and recoated, then reinstall everything for the Spring term. That was fun. The following summer I tore back the shelf unit to fix some things that hadn’t gone well during its too-hasty construction, including the installation of much better LED backlighting. The original lighting showed me I have much to learn about soldering, and I’ll leave it at that.
What you can’t see in this picture are the many other improvements that have been made in the studio and control room. In 2015 we were still producing in standard-definition. Our three studio cameras were 20 years old and only one was still working, but barely; our teleprompter system was from the early 1990s and was the last MS-DOS machine on campus. Our switcher was installed in 2011, but it was standard-definition as well. Years of deferred upgrades and low budgets were catching up with us. In Fall 2015 we got the first of our current BlackMagic Design studio cameras, amazing machines that are amazingly affordable, which we tied in with our existing switcher through converter boxes. In Winter 2016 I built a new teleprompter system that runs off a modern Windows machine. In 2019 we completed a full HD upgrade in our control room, and all we’d need to move to 4K would be new cameras. Other upgrades are possible in coming years, but we can now think in terms of expansion instead of survival. That’s always preferable.
I’m no broadcast engineer or professional set designer. I’m just someone who had to use a tiny budget and a lot of imagination to solve a big problem. You can, too. It’s not that difficult if you’re determined to do it the best you can. I’m always happy to share what I’ve learned with others who must teach broadcasting while working with small budgets and similar challenges. It can be done.