Content Production · Studio Build · Video Direction
Built from zero. 200+ videos
and a studio nobody asked for.
A piece of glass, a 3D printed clamp, and a DSLR turned into a permanent broadcast studio inside a pandemic-driven office move.
Company
KLAS Research
Role
Video Studio Director
Timeline
2020 - 2023
Disciplines
Studio Design · Production · Direction
The situation
A piece of glass, a 3D printed clamp, and a couple of DSLRs
The studio started with almost nothing. I was on the marketing and development team, and a few of us saw that KLAS needed better visibility into the subjects we reported on, along with a way to promote upcoming user summits. I had a multimedia degree and camera experience from my time at AdvancedMD, so I picked up a DSLR and started recording in a borrowed office. We even rigged a makeshift teleprompter out of a piece of glass and a 3D printed clamp. It worked well enough to prove the idea had value.
Fifteen thousand dollars and a list I wrote myself
The build
Once the small experiments proved useful, KLAS gave the project a real budget, roughly $15,000 to $20,000, and let me build a permanent studio. I selected every piece of equipment myself, lighting, backdrops, cameras, lenses, recording gear. The physical room came out of a larger office rebuild I had little control over, but once the walls were up, the working studio inside them was mine to plan.
The situation
A piece of glass, a 3D printed clamp,
and a couple of DSLRs
The studio started with almost nothing. I was on the marketing and development team, and a few of us saw that KLAS needed better visibility into the subjects we reported on, along with a way to promote upcoming user summits. I had a multimedia degree and camera experience from my time at AdvancedMD, so I picked up a DSLR and started recording in a borrowed office. We even rigged a makeshift teleprompter out of a piece of glass and a 3D printed clamp. It worked well enough to prove the idea had value.
Studio budget I planned and managed
from equipment list to build-out
$15–20K
200+
Videos produced over three years,
from expert interviews to company events
Years operating the studio, from early DSLR
experiments to a full production room
3
The close
Sales used it to close deals.
Leadership couldn't measure why.
The videos worked. Sales teams used them to close deals and bring in new customers. But measuring the return on a video studio is genuinely hard, and leadership never found a clean way to tie the work to a number on a spreadsheet. That gap between real value and measurable value taught me something I carry into every creative role since: the work has to be visible in the metrics leadership already trusts, not just visible in the results people quietly rely on.
