Melissa Moore Television Journal: 'AS LIVE' PRODUCTION: Set Design

Katie and myself looked into different set designs, we needed to decide on little bits such as, are our presenters standing or sitting? If they're sitting, are they sitting on a sofa or separate chairs? Are we going to invite all the people we talk to in our VTs onto the set? e.g. the owner of the independent shop, the persons wardrobe we go through? etc. Therefore, we may need another sofa for the guests to sit on. Sitting makes sense as it's a chat show and on current shows such as This Morning, Loose Women, The Jeremy Kyle Show, the presenter/s and guests all sit down to chat.

We decided in the end to have high stools for the presenters and guests to sit on, this way they are sitting down but are high enough for the back row of the audience to see them.

I researched into chat show sets online and found a few examples:

Photos from Google Images

We both liked the brick wallpaper (bottom left photo) the most so we decided to have that on the wall behind the presenters and guests. I liked the idea of having free standing walls (bottom right photo), it makes the set look slightly different and gives it a bit of depth. This then led onto an idea of having a pillar like wall standing in front of the back wall, which the television can go on, for the VTs.

We wanted the layout to be quite simple with two diagonal walls coming out of the back wall.

This will then open out the set for the whole audience to see. I came up with the idea of having a door in the back wall behind the pillar for the presenters and guests to walk though, this way the audience will just see them appear from behind the wall which would look good from their perspective. Katie liked the idea of a feature wall and we couldn't decide whether we liked white brick or brown brick, so we decided to use both. White brick for the back wall to keep the set light and brown brick for the pillar for the feature wall effect.

Katie wanted a lot of plants in the set to give it a rustic and homely feel and we liked the idea of having the high stools in front of the pillar, facing slightly inwards towards the television. We wanted to put in a clothes rail, to establish the fashion theme and the clothes on the rail will be the 'trends of the week' from the first section in the show. We had the idea of a HOT or NOT board, similar to The Cool Wall in Top Gear. This will be placed on the opposite side of the clothes rail, behind the presenters. This way it is easy for them to get to and use.
Katie created an online version of our set while I created a mini 3D version.

Katie's online set

We imagine the set to be about 10m wide from the front (the widest part) and about, 5m deep and 3m tall. We think this is a reasonable size to fit in our studio, big enough for people to walk around on and to still have room around the sides for fire routes.