Ironically, life imitates art imitating life

A few years ago we had to jump through hoops to create a virtual set-- in the same room where now it's a piece of cake.

We rented an audio mixing room in 2005 from Nakamoto Productions, the previous occupant, to shoot a TV spot featuring a fictional radio call-in poker advice show. The room was cramped and small, but we wanted the character we'd created (played masterfully by B-Street veteran Rick Kleber) to have a grand broadcast suite overlooking Las Vegas.

By the time we were done with Photoshop and AfterEffects, the only real things in the scene were Rick and the mixing board.

When we took over the space a year ago, we nuked the glass doors and audio console you see in the photo, opening it up to accommodate our Chromatte virtual set and editing gear. The great thing about this room is that since it started life as a recording studio, it's soooooooo quiet you can't even hear the trains rolling by just across the street. In 2005, we were renting this room for an afternoon; now we've taken over the entire facility with full video (and better audio) production capabilities.

Even though it's much easier to create virtual environments with our current setup, we enjoyed the challenge of making do with what we had to work with. Rick's ad libs as "Granny" in between takes were better than anything we've seen on Saturday Night Live in the last twenty years. Enjoy: