January Kickoff 2026

There was one stage, the desk stage Steve Rivera built early on, and his Our Work Shows type stack from it was too good to lose, so it stayed in the set after he left. I rebuilt a lot of that set and built the rest into a kit, ten builds sharing a vocabulary of slatted wood, gold edge lines and a screen that moves, in a white version and a navy one.

Every stage went out as plates the edit could cut to, and the fullest of them cover seven cameras, a centre super wide, then wide, medium and tight from the left and from the right. Each position came as a clean plate, a template, and a version with the screens already filled, with 8K masters of the wides. An edit could cut any stage from any angle.

The system under it lives in Cinema 4D’s Takes. Every stage has one take per shot, and the shot names were the control, a structure I worked out with our director of productions. Under each shot sits a template take that inherits everything and switches on stand-in figures, so the editor could composite the live talent at the scale I’d set. One output path, $prj$take_, names every file from the stage and the shot, so the folder an editor opened already said what each plate was.

A single stage render is a picture. Ten of them holding together across seven cameras is a system someone else can work inside, and that’s the part worth looking at here.