I’ve taken a trip down to the STOIC studio last week-end in order to have some VHS video transfered from tape to tape. The Tech Manager, Andy, was very helpful. Nice guy. Actually, all of the bodgers that were there were helpful indeed. STOIC certainly has changed in a variety of ways, while also keeping the same flavour for a lot of things….

1. the new studio is now in the basement of Beit Quad.
We would all have killed in order to have such a state of the art studio. Padded walls, all brand new. It’s amazing, it’s so vast.
2. studio defects: the floor is not level, so cameras on dollies tend to travel by themselves.
3. studio defects: the lighting rigs/scaf have up to, I would say, something like 30 plug points, BUT it is so loosely hung from the ceiling that I bet you can probably hang not more than 5 or 6 projectors at any one time. I expect the whole thing to come down crashing soon. Impressive, but spoilt by the builder’s inability at understanding TV needs.
4. Digital Video Editiing suite. It runs on a state of the art Pentium, but, surprise surprise, it is unstable so it crashes regularly.
5. DV mixer: both of them don’t work cuz… cuz they’re just buggered. Image bleached from one of the input channels.
6. Sound Desk – Miracle, that works, but, as usual, not enough mikes, so it’s all running on gun mikes that are gaffered to the boom that is gaffered to the scaf. Go bodging !!
7. Spare sound desks – what we thought of as “brand new sound desk” in our days, is now a humming piece of rotting rubbish.
8. U-MATIC – still used. Heads totally shagged.
9. old kit/ memorabilia: CEL equipment which I never saw before has been kept for memorabilia… Old Analogue Vision Mixer has been thrown out long ago. 2 Frame Stores are uptairs in the old studio, waiting to be chucked out cuz nobody in STOIC today ever managed to get them working. A lot of kit was deemed to be ready for the tip. doesn’t surprise me… Anyway, I gather that we will all soon have the possibility of visiting the place once the builders put final touches to a few things, and once they manage to put all of the equipment in proper use. Overall, I was happy to see Gaffer tape as being the most important thing in the studio. I am told that they have a 24h supply of it from the Royal College of Art – and they have already resorted to going there on many emergencies. O.