Studio Facilities

C

Connolly

Member
If you had a large warehouse, a small amount of money and the green light to build a studio, what would you put into it? More importantly, as a filmmaker, what would you like to see in a studio made for the independent filmmaker?
 
A great lighting system and frame. The ability to have interchangable black/white/green walls and floors through the use of painted walls/cyc curtains, etc.

I think the applications would not be strictly independent filmmaking, but for a warehouse I think these things would certainly help make it versatile...
 
A large warehouse is one of the worst places to start trying to convert into a studio. You'd be much, much, much, much better off starting from scratch.

A warehouse is typically located in a noisy area of town (an industrial sector) so you'll have nearby freeways, planes overhead, and machinery/truck noise all around. Second, warehouses typically don't have the quantity and quality of power that you'd want in a studio. And third, a warehouse's heating/cooling system is rarely adequate for a studio situation. Put a few hot lights in there and you'll be taxing a warehouse A/C system already, and it's pretty sure that the warehouse's A/C is going to be extraordinarily noisier than a dedicated studio A/C system would be. Finally, warehouses are frequently not clear-span space, they have support beams throughout -- and that limits the free space and the type of sets you can bring in/build and the type of shots you can get.

In short, people try it all the time and it's rarely a good idea. Well, it's rarely the best idea, let's put it that way.

Some major problems to overcome. And you say you have "a small amount" of money -- what constitutes a "small amount"? And what kind of space do you have to work with? 20,000 sf? 2,000 sf?
 
I recently watched "Lost in La Mancha", about how Terry Gilliam tried to get The Man Who Killed Don Quixote made. One of the scenes is of him and some of the crew walking into a large warehouse in Spain and it was just aweful. Terrible sound quality with a very bad echo... Visually it would be nice, but for audio, forget it.
 
Echo attenuation is going to be an issue, obviously. Insul-Quilt is a fabric echo attenuation/soundproofing material made for use inside studios; you can also get fabric acoustic panels. The key to controlling echo is to break up the sound path, and minimize hard surfaces (i.e., have some large absorbent material). If you could blanket your walls in six-inch-thick UltraTouch natural cotton insulation, you'd have fantastic echo containment. (you'd need to put something over it though; it flakes off dust and you don't really want to go breathing that, so I used a black mesh tarp from Harbor Freight Tools). Even just having the floor covered with a blanket of this stuff removed all echo from the total echo chamber that my garage studio was.

There are custom acoustic panels you can get, but to cover a large warehouse that's gonna be a *lot* of money.
 
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