Happy Stories

Happy Stories with Grace and Chelsea

Before we ever started thinking about who we'd put on camera, we had to build the room. We wanted a really fun set: a giant red room with a nice white couch in the middle of it. And we didn't want to green screen anything.

So we all sat down together and plotted it out. What are the dimensions of the room? Where do we have to put the camera? What kind of lens do we want? How far off the wall should the couch be to still get depth? We didn't want to build a room that was too big, but it couldn't be a small room either. We also had to think about how we were going to light it, because we wanted this to be a set we reused a bunch.

Building it was a whole ordeal. It went up in a warehouse, so we had to figure out how we were going to mount the lights, and we had to make it so it could break down and fold away. It's three giant pieces that screw together right on the corners, plus a big rug that rolls up. From further away, it's kind of ridiculous.

The set didn't give us a story on its own, though. This one wasn't even the first one we did. There was another one that just didn't work, and we never did anything with it: the story wasn't fleshed out. Some of our salespeople were excited about a great customer and the connection they had, but that on its own isn't a story worth telling in this format.

I also ended up being the one asking the questions. We had a much more social person on the team who left, so I had to start doing the interviews. It was something I'd always been nervous about, and I never wanted to do it. But in the end I actually loved it, because it's really fun to just sit there and have a conversation with someone about their experience. That's all it's about.

For this one, we had an employee and a customer who were just great friends. It was an absolute joy working with them, getting them in there on the couch and just talking.