The New Studio: 5-Month Buildout Complete
After months of hard work, nights and weekends of blood, sweat, and tears, day-to-day operations have moved to the new studio space!
I don't want to brag, but I've been working from home before it picked up all the popularity in 2020. (I beat it by 7 years, but who's counting)
When Eric and I started this business in 2011, a studio space was high on the priority list. After all, if we want to be taken seriously there needs to be a door on a main street in a metropolitan area, and that door has to lead to a very chic space with high ceilings, a coffee bar, and very cool music. We quickly obliged, and, don't get me wrong, it was great, but the big realization was the work we loved to do was outside, and the clients we were doing that work for didn't live or work in town for the quintessential "pop-in" we were expecting would happen in our downtown space. (Honestly looking back what a nightmare that would have been for any productivity) So as quickly as we opened our wallets to pay rent, we closed the doors to that studio space and took our preproduction, gear prep, and post-production efforts home.
9 years go by, Eric makes a change and moves on from the business, I lose some projects, win some others, and with an incredible team do the best work of my career. And everything stops. 2020.
With the room that was my office now painted as a nursery, I quickly finished a space downstairs that would be Aumen Film Co's new HQ. It was roomy, I had space for gear, to edit in my chair, AND have another chair for the parade of clients who will undoubtedly be lining up for basement meetings where we whisper because the 3 month old is asleep just above us.
New plan, when I built the garage onto our house I had the foresight to use "bonus-room trusses" for the roof, which gives you exactly what it sounds like: a little bonus room. Because the room was small it was quick to finish, and gave me what I was missing: quiet. But the trade off was a big one, the gear would have to be spread between that small office, the old basement office, and the garage beneath me. This made packing for shoots take DAYS while I scoured the house for that one piece of kit that I was just sure I saw somewhere. This, along with a few other headaches caused by the space, led me to start dreaming bigger.
I started looking at commercial real estate again, and considered renting for the first time in 12 years. The market was NOT friendly. My focus quickly shifted to, "for a third of what this would cost monthly I can just build it myself." We had the space (4 acres to be exact). Around 2 years of saving, drawing up blueprints, and dreaming later, we broke ground. I brought in a great Amish family to get the initial bones, walls and roof built, then went to work framing the entire interior alone, handling all the interior plumbing, HVAC, electrical, and low-voltage wiring myself. I grew up learning many of these trades, but more importantly I learned how to love learning and carry the attitude that anything is possible. There were lots of moments of burnout, and after decimating my spirit with drywall on the two prior-mentioned projects, I decided it best to hire that and the final painting out - very very happy with this decision.
The new studio has a few zones, a large gear storage area with plenty of space for rig-buildouts and experimentation. There's meeting space, a kitchenette, an office for prepro, post production, day-to-day running of the business, and meetings. There's a small cyc wall large enough for camera tests, table-top setups, and one or two person talking heads. One thing that was high on my list after working in a small space with 2 separate noisy NAS systems and a total of 22 spinning hard-drives chattering all day: a dedicated space in a locked closet for a real network rack, to and from which I personally ran so many Cat6 cables that footage can transfer to any corner of this studio so fast I wont even have to drive to Starbucks to upload footage for my colorist anymore (I will miss the bacon goudas, though).
