Edit Suite Art

[Todd Terry]

Well everyone has different tastes, I suppose….

Our whole place (not just the suites) is very retro-y and funky….

Most every room in our place has mostly cool/funky Eames-era furniture… some we paid a lot for, some we paid virtually nothing for (vintage Eames lounge chair in almost perfect condition that I got at Goodwill for 10 bucks… probably worth a couple thousand).

In the suite I normally work in, the artwork is large black-and-white prints (one aerial shot of the NY skyline taken in the 1940s, and a nighttime shot of a very cool 50s era diner)…

Adjacent to the client seating area is a gigantic seriograph print of “Palm Springs after Dark” from the artist Josh Agle, who paints under the name “Shag”….

I use to have real theatre seats in this suite (great art deco seats that were rescued from a Hollywood movie palace), but they proved cooler in theory than in practicality… so we ditched them.

Our other main suite also has black and white prints, a big vintage funky Curtis Jere wall sculpture (very “Bewitched”), and a great client couch that we rescued from a thrift store that should have been in Ricky and Lucy’s apartment.

Lots of Lava Lamps, etc. too.

But that’s all just our (well, mostly my) personality. Your space should reflect who you are, but still professional and workable. If you are going to spend a good deal of your waking life there, it should be a place that you want to hang out in.

T2

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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Rich Rubasch]

I went to Michaels and bought those frames for album art and picked a dozen or so albums that I like, old Pink Floyd, Steve Winwood, Donald Fagen, etc. this way I am not stuck with a single piece of art. Every once in a while I can switch them around.

Clients have commented on them and it’s always interesting to say that the album is actually in there!

Works for my suite.

My co-worker bought framed posters from posters.com. Lots of good stuff there too and pretty reasonable.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Christopher Wright]

After seeing Walter’s “professional” Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck edit rooms, I upped the ante and went with velvet Elvis paintings and whooppee cushions for good measure.

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[Alex Huber]

Cool! — I LOVE Shag, have always been a big fan of his work. Great score!

Alex

[Walter Biscardi]

[Christopher Wright] “After seeing Walter’s “professional” Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck edit rooms, I upped the ante and went with velvet Elvis paintings and whooppee cushions for good measure.”

What?! You mean Wally World (toybox), JungleLand (Indiana Jones), and Rialto (50’s Theater)? We don’t even own a Donald Duck unless you could the Donald Pez on top of the Coke Machine. 🙂

Unfortunately the photos on the website don’t do the facility justice and the Rialto Room isn’t even up there yet. Just give us another month and we’ll be launching the biscardicreative.com 2.0 and you’ll really get to see our Mickey Mouse, er, Professional Edit Suites! Geez, we got three of them now! 🙂

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

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[Jeremy Doyle]

As we have 12 suites which also happen to be our offices, there are no themes per se at our offices.

My suite has family photos, a wall calendar, fish mounts, awards, and thank you’s that people have sent.

One guy has an aquarium which I think is pretty darn cool.

Guess that’s the kind of stuff you get when you work on outdoors programming.

[Tim Robinson]

I have a huge saltwater at home, but I think having a big glass case of water in this room would be a little nerveracking for me when I’m not here. Plus how to explain the $100k’s of damnage to your bosses when there’s a slow leak over the weekend?

[Jeremy Doyle]

There are several people with fish tanks in our building, but he’s the only one in the TV dept. If it leaked there really wouldn’t be much to damage where he has it located. I’m sure he’d be very heartbroken with the loss of his thousands of dollars of rare and hard to locate fish however.

[Mark Suszko]

I started doing video editing and production in the 80’s when the rooms were generally all so expensive it was de rigur to also trick them out with fine furniture and lots of themes and art. My corner office, which is away from the suites, has quite the tiki and polynesian/Hawaiiana thing goin’ on in it. “Early Jack Lord” I call it. Also a huge collection of pics of my kids on the walls to remind me what it’s really all in service of.

But my tastes for what to do to decorate a ***suite*** have changed over the years. Once upon a time I would welcome any number of little toys, totems, mascots, tchachkies, what-have-you. But nowadays, I’m about having the edit space itself be as neutral and nondistracting as possible. A back wall or corner with some award plaques as a shorthand to say I know my craft might be as far as I would want to go.

If it was always just my own edit room, and I never had clients in it, I might get more wild. Because it’s a shared team space, I don’t want it to polarize people too much in any one direction, or clash with the others I have to share the room with. Some of their tastes I don’t much care for, so if I don’t subject them to tolerating my various decorating tastes, neither must I endure their questionable choices. I’d rather all their attention, passive and active, be on the screen. So I like a very subtle, neutral, cozy but non-distracting scheme, and no major color or other art in the room to distort perceptions of the screen. Your basic technical batcave. Like OLD Mission Control at NASA Kennedy: they used to have it super-sterile in there with no non-business related decor or flair of any kind, and not even coffee. It was the chamber and kingdom of steely-eyed Missile Men with astronaut’s lives and billions of dollars worth of National prestige in their hands. “This is the Firing Room”, the head man would intone with deep seriousness: We launch rockets here”.

I DO have drinks and snacks in there, which is blasphemy to some, perhaps many fellow editors. I don’t pretend I can function well for long without those:-) And I can have to do lots of long hours on projects at times where I’ll have to have lunch and dinner while working, generally alone, with the ipod rocking away if I’m doing graphics and not mixing audio. I don’t put the food and drink and candy where it can hurt anything if spilled, but I have to have it there somewhere, preferably on its own table near to hand but off the actual workspace.

[Timothy J. allen]

Our edit suites at NASA Johnson are pretty neutral with gray SONEX acoustic panels on the walls, but there is an occasional “It Came From Outer Space” or “Stars Wars” framed poster decorating the walls. I think one editor has a small alien encased in a lava lamp. (Actually that might be a office now that I think about it…)

Since most of our edit suites are also offices for the Editors, they each personalize them to fit their own taste. They all keep it professional and pretty understated.

By the way, I don’t know how the firing room at KSC is, but I once heard Gene Kranz say that there’s probably still an old ham sandwich stuck somewhere in that network of vacuum tubes they used to send messages to each other in the old Apollo Mission Control. (It’s the same type of system used at drive through bank tellers for depositing checks and coins.) The room looks pristine in historic film footage, but in the old days, I heard that it stunk like only that unique mixture of food, electronics and stale cigars can give a room.