BlampCo Monthly Debrief - April 2025

Greetings, employees!

Welcome to our monthly meeting where we outline where all your kindly donated funds have been spent over the past four weeks, in the name of transparency, friendship and documented tax write-offs.

First of all, if you haven’t already please check out this survey about potential BlampCo merchandise: 

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScdy03terJueA4nXkoyDtJyYxpBUHGqCLacyrhqfxsYLIhyMQ/viewform

I won’t lie, merch makes me inherently uncomfortable, but that’s just part of my vaguely British embarrassment about either asking for money (the irony of putting this message out on a patreon, I know) or people wanting to associate publicly with something they love. But don’t let my hang-ups influence you, please be honest and let us know how you feel so we can keep the vibes of this place right.

ANYWAY, on with the debrief!

This month can be summed up in one word: STUDIO

It’s been a big month of expenditure, but it’s been worth it to turn this:Into this:

It’s glorious, and it’s all ours. Here’s what went into it:

Furniture

That beautiful GeekNSons table is the MVP of the space, no doubt. We are not being sponsored by GeekNSons, this Megan Hex table was bought with private funds many months before BlampCo launched. However, you best believe we’ll be writing it off on our taxes, so we thought it smart to include it on the record here. Also, look at it. LOOK HOW PRETTY IT IS.

We bought four lovely blush chairs from a company called daals - despite being a proper noun, they insist on having their name be all lowercase and I hate that. Still, the chairs are comfy on the butt, which will help if we’re planning on shooting long games. We are indeed planning on that.

To convert the room from a tiny box of echoes, we bought a carpet from Dunelm, and several loads of hex-shaped soundproofing. Depending on our test records, we may attach sound panels to the ceiling, but right now the fewer holes we drill into that relatively thin bit of drywall, the better.

Equipment

We swapped out the old ceiling light for an LED one. It comes with an app, allowing us to change the warmth and brightness of the light to best match the other lights we’re installing, as well as wash the room with some colour if we’re feeling disco.

Two more blackmagic cameras have been purchased, bringing us to a grand and wallet-bothering total of three. We may need one more, but considering the size of the studio and the quality of the cameras, we’re hopeful that we’ll only need two cameras for player coverage (one camera handling both a wide master and a punched-in mid-shot angle of two players, the other capturing the mid-shot angle on the other two players) leaving us the third one for overhead shooting. The chances are that we’ll get one more eventually, to provide a more interesting diagonal view of the game boards if nothing else, but for now these extra cameras pretty much maxed out our budget.

How to securely rig our ceiling proved to be a bit of a puzzler, but we’ve come up with a solution that’ll allow us to mount an overhead camera without drilling into the ceiling. The room is narrow, so we bought a Manfrotto autopole. It’s a genius bit of equipment. It’s just a rubbed padded pole, but spring-loaded so we extend it to both ends of the room, pull the lever and that locks it firmly in place with more than enough load capacity to handle our camera, which we’ve attached using a cage, held by two magic arms to superclamps attached to the pole. Secure, and flexible enough to shift around the ceiling with ease! Finishing off the rig are some safety chains, just in case the magic arms fail, but they’re feeling super solid.

In order to maximise the quality of the top-down shot we’ve bought an external monitor for the camera so we can have it as close to the ceiling as possible and still check for perfect focus. The only downside to Blackmagic is that the camera screen can’t be flipped towards you if you're filming yourself, but a monitor fixes that problem. 

We’ll need a wide angle lens to capture the entire table from the relative short distance between the tabletop and the ceiling. Good ones are VERY expensive (we’ve got our eye on a £1,600 one, for example) but budget limitations means that we’ll have to rent a lens until we can afford one with next month’s Patreon money. Lenspimp is a great local company for that, letting us try our expensive lens for a fraction of the cost.

Finally, sound. The biggest pain in the arse while filming Board Game Club in Draughts (and to a lesser extent the NRB studio) was getting good audio from multiple loud people crammed into a small room. We’ve purchased two pairs of Rode Wireless Pro mics, and while we’re not 100% certain that this will be the final set-up, we wanted to try this before going for the SUPER expensive lav mics.

Payroll + Freelancers

Not much change from last month. Teri and I took our salaries as we normally do, and we chucked Jon Gracey a little extra for the FIVE HOUR Rad Time recording. Finally, lovely Pete Quinnell appeared on this month’s live-stream for WrestleMania and we’re sure the money he made softened the blow of watching Travis Scott determine the outcome of that god awful main event.

Once again, bless Tessothemorning, SorceressFeraly and Level20Geoff for their stellar work modding the streams and discord, as well as Geoff’s beautiful banner he knocked up.

Subscriptions

The usual monthly expenses of Netflix, Adobe, Epidemic Sound, and Zoom Pro. To that we’ve added a monthly sub to Motion Array, to help Teri design beautiful graphics for the videos moving forward.

Rough Total for April

£14,500.

Yup. Ouch. But hey, you can’t take it with you, right? Thank god for you lot.

Future Plans/Expenses 

Well, we’re almost ready to launch BlampCo’s official YouTube channel, and bloody hell that’s happened a lot sooner than I thought it would. Part of me wants to stay in this Patreon cocoon forever - you’re so much nicer than everyone out in the real world - but we know that the best way to keep BlampCo sustainable long-term is to have a public shopfront to advertise the Patreon, so SCREW IT LET’S DO THIS.

By this time next month we will have put out at least one public wrestling video and one public board gaming video, and that is a truly exciting and oddly scary prospect. In terms of upfront costs, we’re almost there - probably only another camera and maybe upgraded sound tech to go. The rest of the money will go into making sure we pay our freelancers a great rate for the ramped-up amount of content we’re planning.

We’re not going to spoil any new formats just yet, but here’s one word that will hopefully mean a lot to you soon: ‘TURNOVER’.

Endless thanks to those of you who have helped to make this all possible. I can’t really believe it, but here we are. You’re the best, and we’ll make sure that the content we make repays your investment. We hate sponsored content and youtube ads, and if we keep our Patreon healthy enough to mean that we can demonetise the YouTube channel as much as humanly possible, we think everyone will enjoy the content A LOT more.

Keep watching this space, May’s going to be exciting…

Until then, get back to work

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