In 2023 our lease was discontinued. Our Plans for redecorations had fortunately not yet been set in motion,
due to a heavy workflow.
A new location was offered us on the same site – building N3 – only 300 meters away from our present location.
So a new studio had to be constructed.
We changed the name from The Film Factory As to Evil Doghouse Postproduction As.
NOTE:All images can be seen in their original size by selecting: Open image in a new tab .
The new location had 3 floors 125 m3 each. Google view:
The entrance.
Since we had new film waiting for a final mix, we started with building a new mix-stage.
The top floor was the only floor with a suitable layout: One big room 70m2, quite okay for a mid-sized Mix Stage.
The other room was 59 m2, which I found to be suitable for technical installations, a kitchen, and an office with
a small customers area.
This floor is what I will deal with in this thread.
[h2]The Top Floor[/h2]
Here is my first sketch of the floor plan:
This room is where I want to have my mixing theatre. This room is 70 m2 and the height is 4 meters.
This is a rendered image based on the floor plan. The person is a standard 180cm man placed for size reference.
This other part will serve as a combined kitchen, customers area and, hopefully, my office.
It has a ceiling height of 270 cm, which is quite sufficient.
With plenty of windows, blinds were needed, but my office would get a very nice view:
I started designing in March, using Sweet Home 3D, simply to make it easier to get my ideas through
to the landlord for opinions and approvals. He was pleased, and had no objections to my plans.
We started building the top floor in June.
[h2]The Mix Stage[/h2]
Here’s the top floor rendered with the ceiling and some walls made invisible:
We had to get rid of the windows, and insulate the walls , both for outside noice and the neighbours.
Windows are now blocked and walls and floor insulated. Elevated plateaus for spectators are finished.
Things are moving forward. Ceiling with downlights are up, and the casing for the ventilation is done.
We have mounted the projector, and here we are adjusting the placement and angles.
An early rendering of what I wanted my new mix-stage to look like:
With some adjustments it turned out like on this iPhone snapshot:
An early rendering of the workbench and the screen:
And this is what it became:
The choice to have a laminate floor beneath the mixing console wasn’t just about aesthetics – it also facilitated better
conditions for chairs with castors, in addition to offering some acoustic benefits. The mix stage was a versatile, thoughtfully
designed space, the room looking open and spacious in a rather small room for a mixing stage.
It was designed to accommodate a sound technician, a director, a producer, and twelve spectators.
Directors and producers have a dedicated workbench with enough room for their laptops, notebooks, water and coffee.
They can either work at their bench or sit alongside the technician at the mixing console, ensuring easy collaboration.
The mixing console also included a near-field stereo setup, featuring Neumann Berlin speakers plus a 60-inch TV that could
be elevated in front of the mixing console. This allowed us to adapt the room to mixing for television and streaming audio.
My workbench as rendered:
The workbench, as it turned out:
At the heart of the Mix Stage there’s a very functional workstation called Nuage. I needed to make a model of it,
which took a while.
Apart from the rounded sides, this model, like most other models and work prints were all created with SH3D.
The workbench.
The workbench with the Nuage Control Surface:
This is my cinema speaker setup – rendered with a wall and the screen removed.
Proper speaker placement and calibration ensured that our listening environment met commercial
cinema specifications, providing the best translation to every normal 5.1, and 7.1 configuration.
This is an early rendering with the screen frame from our old studio.
Later the screen was replaced with a wider one, and the frame extended to fit the distance from wall to wall.
And of course there must be amplifiers and technical equipment to route the sound to the right channels.
Normally these things would be hidden from the customers, but I decided to let it all be visible.
Some people like to see this sort of things, and sometimes people even ask to see our technical rooms.
Being a composer and a musician, I naturally want to compose film-music in a cinema.
[h2]The Kitchen / Office[/h2]
Building the kItchen / office was poorly documented. The last finish:
The kitchen turned out like this:
As for my office – well, it became a combined office, lunchroom and service / maintenance room.
A desk for repairs and soldering cables was of course needed for the entire building process.
In the next thread I will attempt to show how I constructed and built the middle floor.
