Building a new "set"

I live in a very small house in a part of the country where houses are not typically very large. I know that compared to an apartment this is probably a mansion, but to put it simply, there are very few parts of this house that are useful for my purposes. 

For instance, although I have a large basement area I could convert into a very respectable and proper studio set, I would have no way of isolating the sound from the rest of the house (and the three people I live with) just to pick one problem. There are countless others. 

Consequently, I am limited to a single room, something like 11x14', which must fit all of my hobbies, all of my work (since I do an IT/networking job from home, so I have to have switches and routers and firewalls hooked up at all times) and my "studio."

When I started making youtube videos I was literally just pointing a camera at whatever I was doing with minimal presentation or even cleanup because, honestly, who was watching it? Yeah, I put in some effort to make a publicly-presentable work, but I knew I was expecting maybe 300 views, from people who mostly knew me personally, and that's exactly how it played out.

Suddenly I'm becoming a bit more notable, and while 14k subscribers is not Hollywood and isn't even "big" for a youtube channel, everyone keeps telling me (and I'm grateful for your support) that I'm gonna have 100k by the end of 2021. Well, we'll see about that, but I certainly don't want to drive anyone away with a veneer of apathy, because I do care about how I look, I just didn't have a lot of choices for improvement that didn't require huge commitments.

The biggest change in my style was 10 or so videos ago when I built a presentation table so I could make my points about the NES RF modulator effectively, and that seemed to bring in a lot more people, but my office is *very tight.* To wit, see the first attached picture. There's no room other than what you see there, and obviously everything is absolutely crammed in to make it work at all. I basically had to move stuff to the side every time I shot a video.

Another big problem is that my office is in a basement. Two walls are concrete, which is miserable to work with - I know I could improve the surface texture, but it's an ungodly amount of work and requires a ton of drilling and material I can't really get easily right now. The third wall is drywall, but it's where my PC is and that can't really move. But I realized that the fourth wall, which is also drywall, could make a nice, unobtrusive backdrop if I turned the entire office 180°, re-mudded the wall (the original drywall work was a real rush job) and painted it.

So that's what I did, with the help of my long-suffering girlfriend who supports me more than I deserve - I made a time lapse of the whole process so far; I'll warn you that my ass is almost certainly visible in several points if you pause it, I just do not have the patience to frame-hunt every single ass-shot. C'mon, it's construction work, asses are gonna hang out.

I don't think I'm going to get a Hollywood-quality, or even TV-quality 'set' out of this. I'm not a designer, I don't know what's a good color scheme or anything - dark blue seemed like a good idea for the sake of high contrast and low reflection, but who knows, maybe when I shoot my first video in front of it I'll go "oh no this is horrible." Hopefully however it'll be a lot easier to watch my stuff without the visual noise of all that crap back there - although I do intend to put some on-topic decorations up as soon as some new furniture arrives.

If anyone has any suggestions I'm all ears, but I just wanted to give everyone a peek at what's (probably) coming. Happy New Year, everyone! Here's to a better one!