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Setting up a new studio. Tips and advice please!
Hey all,
So we’re at the stage of stepping our little operation up a gear, and next month sees us moving into new premises. Yay!
Nothing too swanky and in a deeply unfashionable part of town, but who cares about that, apart from poseurs, right?
Best part is, the new place is split level, with a decent space downstairs to put a little studio in. We’re gonna spend a bit of money soundproofing the place and the hope is that alongside being able to do our own studio work in-house, we’ll also be able to rent it out for other production companies, photographers and castings.
As you might expect, we haven’t got megabucks to lavish on this and I imagine we’ll be building it up piecemeal as we go along.
So I’d be very interested to hear any advice or tips any of you might have about getting a working studio up and running on the cheap.
Over to you!
D
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5 Replies
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Use someone else’s money.
🙂
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Hi Dylan,
Building a studio isn’t cheap – but there are things you can do to control costs. We just finished building a small insert stage last December.
The biggest challenges were to get enough electric for lighting and enough A/C to keep the place cool (we’re in Florida) without having A/C noise.
We also had the idea to make it available to other production companies but didn’t want them to feel like they were bringing their client to a competitor. That’s why we branded it separately from our production company.
We learned a lot of lessons along the way that I’ll gladly share with you. If you’d like, check the studio out at https://www.GreenSlateStudios.com and send me a private message with any questions.
Good luck!
Steve Martin
Omni Productions
Orlando, FLProduction is fun – but lets not forget: Nobody ever died on the video table!
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With the way rates are falling, I wouldn’t do this unless it would be booked a minimum of 100 days per year. Anything less than that and you probably won’t stay in business long enough to amortize the cost.
Scott Sheriff
Director
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” —Red Adair
Where were you on 6/21?
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Hey Steve,
Thanks very much for your offer. I’ll take a look at your set up and no doubt have a bunch of questions to bug you with!
To everyone else: yes, it is a sizeable financial step we’re taking, and unfortunately, it’s our own money! What’s going in our favour is that we don’t need to rent the studio out. Like I said, the premises are in a cheap unfashionable part of town so the rent is manageable without the need for extra income. It would be nice if we could get it to pay for itself, and that could be done on as little as 40 hires per year.
What it does do is enable us to expand our capacity and start churning out more work. And if I ever want to retire, that’s the direction we’ve got to take!
Cheers!
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You Bet!
Production is fun – but lets not forget: Nobody ever died on the video table!
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