In an upcoming episode of Professional Speaking, I am going to share how I transformed a house on my property into a full-fledged home-studio for delivering virtual keynote speeches.

But in this week’s episode of Professional Speaking I want to share a “not so glamorous” episode of that process.

I had 3 virtual speeches to deliver last week, but my greenscreen stand had not arrived from Amazon so I decided to use a number of boxes with books to build a “wall” that I could hang the greenscreen from. (It’s 3 X 6 meters so I needed a big wall.)

It worked great and the speeches went well with me being able to walk around and deliver a speech instead of being “stuck” right in-front of the camera.

After the last virtual speech I kept the greenscreen up as I had one zoom interview to appear on. That went well too, after that I went to have lunch.

When I came back after lunch and opened the door I saw that all the boxes – we are talking about 30+ boxes @ 10 kg each – had crashed down (some of them from 2.5 meters up) right down where I had been recording not long before.

They brought down the screen, knocked over my camera (it survived), broke a table, and almost smashed my MacBook Air. And had I stood there speaking when it happened a bunch of them would have crashed down on me…

Had this happened while I was broadcasting it would have been a total disaster – or a very funny viral video. Or both.

The lesson here is to build professional solutions – even when building things at home. The solution I built was temporary, but still. I should have invested time in building a professional solution.

And that is what I am doing now.

Actually, the incident made me go back and take a second look at the backdrop solution I had planned and redesign the solution I wanted to make it easier to switch from white background to greenscreen etc.

I am sharing this story with you to show that not all works out great “behind the greenscreen” for professional speakers, even if it looks all good and shiny on screen.

I hope me sharing this can help you in your struggles to develop your virtual speaking knowing that what you see online is not always what actually goes on behind the scenes.