The Black Lodge

To build my post production studio for film work, I had to decide on a design that was ideal for long hours of cutting picture and sound with enough floor space for clients.

I started by completely clearing out my very vanilla office and repainting my work station.

The room was Summer Linen white with Mocha trim to match the other bedrooms. Then I repainted my work station.

The room was only painted and trimmed to match the other rooms when I first moved in but it wasn’t ideal for movie editing and computer design. Light reflected off everything.

After a thorough search of Google and Pinterest, the latest fad is purple back lit monitors and AV equipment to the point of eliminating any real distinction between a post production room and a gaming room. Color LEDs are more at home in a gamers bedroom, rather than a professional work environment.

Ultimately, I came up with the idea for The Black Lodge, a non-reflective environment for film and other audio/visual development work.

I just had to find a good, flat black interior paint that didn’t cost custom blended paint prices. Fortunately, Walmart carries something that does the job without the high price tag – their Flat Onyx Black.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/441618255

The sound abatement went up on the walls, which I painted flat black, along with the ceiling.

The different color cabling is all getting wrapped in black plastic so everything is subdued and doesn’t draw attention to any exposed wires.

I removed the groovy ceiling fan and replaced it with exposed steel conduit and utility boxes that I painted with pickup truck bed textured black paint then put in the wiring for ceiling mounted track lighting so my spot lights hit where I want and nowhere else. There’s no photo of them because flat black on black is camouflaged, even using a flash.

Surrounded in flat black, the only color in the room is a band along the top edge of the walls with hand painted animation backgrounds my dad created for various cartoons in the 1960s. That’s pretty unique gallery stuff.

I’m in the middle of hanging animation art. Tomorrow, I populate the computers and other equipment in there so I can get started on the next job.

The mountain view outside the door wasn’t something I wanted to lose permanently just to black out the room when it becomes necessary so I built a light weight plug for blocking the door glass.

It’s like a hinged door within a door, that plugs all light from getting into the place, using a simple bolt style latch. It only weights about five pounds so the small hinges can manage the load weighing on the door without any trouble.

It looks cleaner than some kind of black out curtain and if I want to see outside, there are no curtains to tie back, it opens as easily as a cabinet door. And no one can see in from the outside.

The work station needed a monitor shelf. I had some brackets and some lumber left over from using a plank for a motorcycle loading ramp. I just had to come up with an idea to make a decent monitor shelf from the scraps.

i ended up welding and painting three L shape steel angles into a mount that supports the shelf from beneath and a clamp on the lower end, which engages the desktop. I put some padding on the angle that sits on top of the desktop to protect the finish.

My workstation is six by three feet but I didn’t want to drill any holes into the desk surface. The clamp on the bottom of the brackets is only screwed onto the desktop on the underside because the clamp shape is load bearing, the screws only hold it in position. The screws holding the shelf on don’t bear any load either. Bearing the weight is the job of the welding and it does that very well.

My post production office, The Black Lodge, is still a work in progress.