Want To Set Up Your Own Studio?

For Dog Years, our pre-school live-action dog show, we created our own IP and made our own studio from scratch, facilitating all the pre-production, development and post-production ourselves. How did we do it? SO GLAD YOU ASKED.

FIND A WAREHOUSE

We're based in Bournemouth in Dorset so we didn't want to travel far from home for our new studio base. We started researching two options: an empty building that could be repurposed for our needs, and vacant warehouses. The warehouse option emerged as the most suitable and affordable, so we found one that was available, neatly tucked away at the back of an industrial estate in Poole.

STUDIO PLANS

Once we agreed the warehouse lease, we put our studio plans into action. This meant making sure that our purpose-built set would work to scale in our new premises, and that all our technical requirements could be met. On our mezzanine floor, we divided it up into four zones: costume rail/changing, camera department, props area, and a gallery section. We also had a production office right by the entrance, and a big loading/delivery door area.

BUILDING THE SET

In collaboration with our production designer (Becky Cutts), director of photography (Radi Nikolov), line producer (Steve McCarten) and set builder (Handy Andy Stewart), we were able to build the key foundations of our studio: the floors & walls, a bespoke lighting rig (thanks to the genius of gaffer Simon Battensby), and then all the necessary furnishings for the set. It all started to take shape!

WRITERS' ROOM

L-R: Tim Clague, Jan Caston, Steve McCarten (standing), Tim John, James Cary, Kate Scott, Debbie Moon, Danny Stack

Tim and I invited some of our writer friends to join us in the Dog Years writing room. Luckily for us, they happen to be some of the hottest kids' TV writers in the business, including BAFTA-winning Debbie Moon, A Street Cat Named Bob writer Tim John, comedy gury James Cary, children's author Kate Scott, not to mention producers Jan Caston and Steve McCarten.

READY FOR FILMING

Within a couple of months of moving in, we were ready to rock and roll, thanks to the herculean efforts of our core studio team (Becky, Steve, Radi and Handy Andy). We were tweaking and finalising right up to the day we started filming but we had everything in place, and we were ready to shoot. All we needed was our cast, and of course our star dog!

L-R the cast of Dog Years: Smurf the dog, Esther Toward, Claudia Barba, Doug Cockle

FILMING

We filmed 10 episodes over the course of five weekends, with a rehearsal day on Monday, which worked out well for the specific needs of our budget and schedule. Dog Years is now streaming worldwide via Amazon UK/US, Kidoodle TV, as well as Jaramba (Sweden), Me Interactive (Japan) and Ameba (Canada).

If you want to find out more about us (Nelson Nutmeg Pictures), visit our website. We currently have our second feature length film in post-production, and developing lots of other exciting projects. Tim and I also continue to write for animation across film & TV, as well as live-action writer/directors available for hire.

The view from Dog Years studio gallery