Friday 19 August 2011

Blue Peter Style Making Sh*t


As I’ve probably made it quite clear Phil and I have no money. We are not rich, never have been and with our recent run of luck never going to be...
 
‘Well that was F*cking funny’, I hear you cry, ‘Make us laugh you f*ckers!’ Okay, can someone turn the voices off in my head, please?  It wasn’t supposed to be funny, what it is supposed to do is set out the grounds for our endeavours in to constructing our own working TV / Video studio. With no budget you have to do everything yourself on a shoe string, sometimes there isn’t even a shoe to steal a string from (although that should be lace, shouldn’t it?).

Over the last week I have been continuing to create the kit that we need to make a working studio. I did find an amazing green screen and three point lighting kit, which I couldn’t turn down, but the diffusers I made from an old cardboard box and a white t-shirt are being used still in the mini studio that is my shed.  I am even making a hardboard green screen backdrop to be positioned in all of its complete smoothness (the green screen sheet needed ironing) in the shed for eternity.

Amazingly these projects have been going quite well (note: now you’ve really f*cked things up) and I am really happy with the progress I am making. This led me to a strange conclusion that I was enjoying this process more than I thought I would. Yes buying kit straight off the shelf would have hurried up production and I wouldn’t have any reason for procrastinating, but it wouldn’t have given me any feeling of achievement. It would have been like using cheats to complete a video game or something. Also if all of the kit was top notch and really expensive I wouldn’t have anything to blame when it all goes tits up in a few weeks.
I intend to document the shed and the home made kit soon, first I need a haircut and the branded T-shirts to come to me in the post.  Is that more procrastinating, I bloody well hope so?

Please follow us on Twitter: @Transmit7

Tuesday 9 August 2011

The Shed Mini Studio


Finding a space to vlog is hard in my house. I have a three year old son and a beautiful wife who should get more attention than she does (the boy gets it all). With all the toys and clothes that litter the house there is not much space to call my own and definitely not somewhere  to set up my camera kit to get a more professional look to my vlog, which is what I am really looking for.  I want it to be stylish and contemporary.  Whether it will be or not I’ll let you guys be the judges.

So the other day I was thinking where I could do it, the vlog that is.  I need a space that I could just walk into and switch on the lights and press record on the camera.  I was going to do it in the conservatory, but that meant putting up lights, taking them down and that would just be a nightmare. I used to have an office upstairs in our house, but that is now one of two rooms dedicated to our son.  I continued to look.  

Then it came to me, if I got off my lazy bum and cleared the shed out I’d be able to do it in there. Yes it will be cramped, but it’s only my head and shoulders, right? I don’t need much space for that. Until I get a big head that is.  So I cleared the shed, moved everything I still need to the sides and on shelves and started thinking of a backdrop. I’ve put up some lamps, fixed them in place so I don’t have to put them up and take them down. Hopefully they will be enough to bring it all to life, especially as I’ll only get to do this at night for the time being. I’ll have to put up some carpet tiles over the windows to help with the exterior noise, but that’ll be fine.

In our true to form, spend no money and make do, makeshift production ways the Transmit7 mini studio will do just fine, who cares if it is just my shed? I don’t.

I’ll post some pictures when it’s all done and tested, maybe even a video.  

As always please befriend us on Facebook (search for Transmit Seven) and follow us on Twitter @Transmit7 

Wednesday 20 July 2011

Err...hello.. Is there anybody out there?


Hi, welcome to our secondary blog page. We wanted to give ourselves a space in time and...er.. space to bring to you videos, written posts etc that aren’t very showy. These items aren’t the main feature of @Transmit7 and therefore needed somewhere for them to be dumped.

Here we want to do our own video blog of setting up www.transmit7.co.uk and the youtube account http://www.youtube.com/user/TransmitSeven and anything we feel like throwing up here to broaden the reach of our audience as it grows.

Thinks of this space, this blog as the DVD extras you get with most movies.  We can’t promise that it’ll be any good, but as you may have seen on a Mythbusters you can actually polish a turd... so lets start rubbing.

Don’t forget to follow us on twitter at @Transmit7 lets be friends... i mean that in a none creepy way.