Bencredible

As you can imagine Cariann and I have been prepping quite a bit for the big return of Spacevidcast. I always strive to look at what I’m doing and find ways to do it better. I think the new version of Spacevidcast will be no exception.

We have been driving to Watertown a LOT recently (which is where the new studio is) and today ran in to a big of a snag: the system we were going to use to hold up the plasmas won’t work.

We will be broadcasting from cafn8ed’s coffee shop and I figure since he has been nice enough to not only lend us his shop but also his time, we should return the favor any way we can. For starters the two shiny new plasma TVs we have could be used when we’re not there which is like 99% of the time. That means that they need to be on beefy stands that can survive the impact of a 7 year old who wants to run straight at the shiny object. This is not an easy problem to solve with a 120lb top heavy 6′ structure.

In the end I’m sure we will figure it out although we may not have a permanent solution in place for the first show. I’m also concerned that I may have bitten off a bit more than I can chew, but we will find out. Cariann and I are slated to go back out tomorrow and do an equipment run through to make sure we have all the gear needed to make things work. Then on Wednesday we will be doing a dry run through without broadcasting to make sure that we’re all on the same page. After that… well… show time!

I usually like to surprise people with new set designs, web designs and whatnot but instead of taking the closed Apple approach I decided to open up the process and show everyone what has been going on behind the scenes. To that end here are a couple of photos showing off the general concept. Note that the stands for the plasma will be changing to something more like this:

EACH ONE of those stands is $500.00 plus about $100.00 shipping.  That’s over 1/2 the cost of the entire plamsa itself!  Speaking of, here is a look at what the wide shot will sorta look like (this is taken on the crummy iPhone camera and will look much nicer with the full cameras):

And this is what the tight shot will sorta look like.  Again crummy camera please forgive:

And finally here is a wide shot of the studio.  We will probably need to drape the side walls in black and we know we will need to drape the floor in black to make sure the look is complete.  What I really want to do is have a giant shot of the earth animating against the whole back wall and have the plasmas mounted from the ceiling but we simply can’t do that in this space:

Of course NONE of the cameras or lighting is set up in these shots.  I have no idea how I’m going to do the main lights and not get a ton of reflection on the plamsas.  We will make it work though.  The hair lights will be interesting as well, but I think I have a solution for those.  Right now my biggest problem is finding something pretty to put those Plasmas on that doesn’t cose just as much as the plasma itself!