newsymph was founded in York in 2014 by Helen Whitaker, a studio designer who had spent years planning broadcast and rehearsal spaces. We advise television networks and live event teams on studios, camera control, lighting, sound and the workflows that tie them together.
The company began with studio layouts. Helen was asked, again and again, to look at rooms where the equipment was good but the plan around it was not: cable runs that crossed walkways, desks placed where the sound bled in, lighting positions that nobody could reach safely. Fixing those problems on paper, before anything was installed, became the core of the work.
As clients came back with live events as well as studios, the team grew in a sensible order. James Fothergill joined to look after audio chains and mixing, Priya Nandra to plan lighting for stages and sets, and Callum Rhodes to set up camera control and signal flow for multi-camera shoots. Each person covers one discipline well rather than all of them thinly.
Our office sits in Walmgate Yard in York, and most of our conversations start with a phone call or an email from a producer or technical director who has a date in the diary and a set of open questions. We ask to see the space or the venue plan, the equipment list and the crew, then write down what we would change.
Alongside consulting we publish technical guides and run workshops, because a plan only helps if the crew can follow it at two in the morning during a load-out. Many of our guides began as notes written for a single client and were rewritten once we saw the same questions arise elsewhere.
We remain a small business and say so plainly. That means the person you speak to at the start is usually the person who writes your plan, and it means we turn down work that sits outside the five areas we know well, rather than stretch ourselves to cover it.