How SCL Education Turned Their Own Space Into a Professional Podcast Studio

SCL Education wanted to record a series of podcast-style conversations with people from across their team for internal communications. My first thought was pretty simple.

Why move all those people when I can move the studio?

So I took the cameras, microphones, lighting, monitoring and live production kit to them and set up a four-person video podcast setup inside their own premises. It meant the contributors were already somewhere familiar, nobody had to lose half a day travelling to a studio, and SCL’s own space could become part of the look of the programme.

Yes. Although I wouldn’t call every office suitable without seeing it first.

For this one, the space worked really well. SCL already had those brilliant green chairs, the banners gave us instant branding, and there was enough space for me to get the cameras where I wanted them without the whole thing feeling cramped.

I wasn’t trying to make their room look like the WIDEO studio.

Quite the opposite.

I wanted it to look as though SCL had their own podcast studio. The expensive-looking bit shouldn’t necessarily be the room. It’s what you do with it.

Most of the people I film for internal communications aren’t presenters. They’re people who know their subject.

You don’t necessarily want to take somebody out of their normal environment, send them somewhere unfamiliar, put three cameras in front of them and then wonder why they suddenly sound a bit corporate.

At SCL, people could come into a room in their own workplace, sit down with colleagues and talk.

I could worry about the microphones, cameras, lighting and whether everything was recording properly. They could concentrate on the conversation.

And that’s normally where the good stuff comes from.

This is the bit you don’t really see in the finished podcast.

While everyone is talking, I’m producing it. I’m watching the cameras, listening to the sound and cutting between the shots as the conversation happens.

So instead of finishing the recording day with a pile of camera files and starting from zero, you’ve already got a multi-camera version of the programme. That can make a big difference to turnaround.

I can still record the individual cameras and separate audio too, so there’s flexibility afterwards if something needs changing.

But the aim is to do as much of the work properly while we’re there, rather than creating unnecessary work later.

Yes, and this is where taking the studio into an organisation starts to make even more sense.

Once I’ve built it, lit it, framed the cameras and checked the sound, the hard bit is done.

Different contributors can then come in for their conversation without the whole thing having to be rebuilt each time.

That’s useful if you want to record people from different teams, capture several internal stories or make a batch of episodes while everybody is already together.

And because the studio has come to them, you’re not trying to coordinate half the company travelling somewhere else.