One floor underground, below the Stanford University School of Medicine Alway building, lies a state-of-the-art media studio that showcases the Stanford Medicine Educational Technology team’s resourcefulness, skills, and DIY spirit. Teggin Summers, Assistant Dean and Director of Educational Technology, describes the genesis of the new Stanford Medicine Studio.
Q: Tell us about the space and what creators can do there.
A: The Stanford Medicine Studio is located in Alway M039, commonly known as the basement of Alway — which I affectionately call the “garden level.” We are below a ground level courtyard, conveniently located near Lane Library, the Li Ka Shing building, and 500P.
The Studio is approximately 1,500 square feet, and we aimed to maximize the space for the highest level of functionality and impact — building a control room, full production floor, podcast studio, team touchdown space and future Learning Lab, small dressing room, and green room. The production equipment, such as our Black Magic Studio cameras, are state-of-the-art. They record or broadcast in 6K (6048 x 4032 pixels) which honestly sounds excessive, until you realize you can crop into that video 3x and still have an HD image.
The first project filmed in the studio was a brief interview with Blaz Bush, Director of LGBTQ+ Health, for the Teaching Gender Affirming Care trailer. Additional early projects include filming scenes for QGenda communications and filming faculty and patients to develop content for a Family Medicine course.
Q: What sort of content do you anticipate creating in this new space?
A: We anticipate leveraging the space for a wide variety of productions, multimedia explorations, emerging technologies demos, and instructional design consultations. The space will support realistic clinical role-play videos, something for which we have a significant demand, as well as any filming that can happen with a green screen. The production floor can also be used for immersive technology exploration and filming. The fully dressed podcast audio and visual studio can support recorded and live streamed podcasts, as well as filming Zoom interviews.
We are prioritizing content that serves the education, research, and patient care missions, though we also have available services for the Stanford Medicine Communications office and faculty and departments across the University.
Q: Tell us more about the podcast studio — what was the thinking behind its aesthetics and audio/video setup?
A: We know there’s the desire and need to create podcasts within Stanford Medicine, and our podcast studio is designed to make it easy and inviting to create them. It’s ready-to-roll with four in-person guests, remote guests, and an onsite engineer behind the scenes handling both the audio and video.
Our goal is to incubate the next great Stanford Medicine podcasts in this space. The room is acoustically treated with beautiful walnut paneling, a green rug, an oval ash table, and mid-century modern orange chairs, echoing the iconic mid-century architecture of 300P and Stanford color palette. The wood smells great, and the earthy vibe is meant to create a quiet, relaxed space for conversation. The design is a continuation of our “bring the outside in” aesthetic philosophy, which is even more important in spaces that don’t have windows.
Q: Are the cameras and lights the same ones you used for previous filming, or did you bring in new equipment?
A: Before we had this production space, we were limited to on-location filming, which calls for an entirely different workflow than a permanent studio space.
Therefore, all our camera and lighting equipment had to be brand-new, state-of-the-art, and specifically chosen to facilitate a few essential ideals: highest quality, maximum efficiency, seamless workflow, and a one-stop-shop.
This shift in our production workflow was a major growth opportunity for the EdTech team. We needed to research and learn completely new systems, while also planning and building the studio. Because of this, the EdTech team personally selected every piece of equipment and spent an entire year prototyping the studio space in 1830 Embarcadero before moving into the new studio. This allowed us to practice and identify training and knowledge gaps in a low-stakes environment, which allowed us to get the studio online just a few months after we acquired our studio space.
Q: What do you have planned for the future?
A: While live-streaming, audio, podcasts, and video recording are the focus of our initial launch, the space is designed to be multi-purpose. Our team has restructured to include a Learning Innovation Futurists Team with the specific focus of understanding “what’s next” for educational technology, and sharing that with the community at Stanford Medicine. To that end, in the next year we plan to launch a “Learning Lab” in the studio, a play space where faculty, students, and staff can try out the latest technology — whether it be AR, VR, AI, or some other acronym — as it is released.
Q: What cost-saving measures did your team implement?
A: Budget constraints and regulatory restrictions in the 300P buildings prevented us from doing a total renovation of the space or hiring a vendor to install our equipment. In fact, we needed to install the equipment, including high-up lights, and acoustic paneling, without putting a single nail or screw in the walls.
With the exception of the paint and flooring, our studio was entirely do-it-yourself. Our solution was to build rooms within the rooms — using metal lighting trusses that go together like huge LEGO pieces. Several members of the team spent a few days building these together, for a total cost of $26,000 including labor and materials. As a contrast, our vendors quoted us for $75,000 to install a single lighting truss. The team’s DIY spirit saved the organization between $50,000 and $100,000 on this single task alone.
Q: It sounds like quite a team effort.
A: This has been a huge team effort. Bindu Madhava, William Bottini, and Adam Hain spent countless hours and many evenings planning for and building the space. Huy Tran is our expert for all our network and system administration needs. Grace Sextro has been integral in the planning and implementation for the space and Katherine Cao and Lauren Watley helped with so much design and building. The rest of our team members contributed to the design and operational development of the Studio, so it truly has been a collective accomplishment. I would also like to thank leadership, especially Todd Ferris and Michael Halaas, for their ongoing support of this effort, as well as our Facilities, AV Tech, and Lane Library colleagues for their collaboration and partnership.
