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Monday, December 06, 2021
Los Angeles Soundstages Can’t Keep Up With Demand
The Hollywood Reporter: Amid a production rise fueled by Hollywood’s pivot to streaming, the need to lock in filming space is becoming more critical — and a soundstage boom is overtaking the Southland, with competition for space and clients.
While they didn't explicitly say this, I assume the decline in popularity of soundstages in the early 2000s had to do with filming out in the world? And therefore with the emergence of Covid the far more controllable and confined soundstage came back into popularity largely due to the ability to keep people safe? If so that's great and it's nice that even though the demand for these spaces is high, some of these studios are making a conscious effort to include other perks like easy equipment rental, transportation, and food services to give themselves a leg up but also allows the leaser to have improved conditions for their crew and workers. Given all the strife in the film industry over the last few months the little stuff that these companies can do to aid their employees and improve working conditions must be appreciated. I knew there were a lot of soundstages in LA but over 300 was not the number I was expecting. The concentration of them is just staggering to me. Hopefully streaming behemoths like Netflix and Disney Plus will continue to provide a large number of jobs for these LA soundstage workers.
I think I am struggling to understand exactly why there is an increase in occupancy for soundstages. Before the pandemic began, productions were still happening and studio spaces were being leased out so I am just trying to understand how the pandemic has shifted the focus to soundstages, in addition to the already prevailing studios where stuff used to filmed earlier. I have always thought that soundstages are necessary parts of any set, because of how to enables acoustics and spoken dialogue to be recorded in a way. But I am also wondering why, when they had almost been out of use, for what purpose are they being used. Like are they being used in the traditional sense of a sounstage or are they being used as additional space to add to a set. I think it was either the language of the article or just my lack of knowledge about this topic that is leading to all this confusion in my brain.
It sounds like this is a good problem to have. It’s interesting to me the new business model of making the soundstage an all encompassing service with stuff like food and lighting as extra onsite capabilities. It’s surprising to me that this hasn’t been done before as the standard because it seems like if you could keep rental equipment right there onite then you’d have potentially simpler and faster turnaround times. The first thing I thought when I saw the photo of the new fab sound stages in the article was that they look like hotels. They have that same aesthetic as the chain hotels and I was surprised that they didn’t mention having onsite sleeping arrangements. It is interesting that the different soundstage companies are trying out these services when it sounds like there’s already a short supply of just the soundstages themselves and you could probably get away with just doing that for the time being.
3 comments:
While they didn't explicitly say this, I assume the decline in popularity of soundstages in the early 2000s had to do with filming out in the world? And therefore with the emergence of Covid the far more controllable and confined soundstage came back into popularity largely due to the ability to keep people safe? If so that's great and it's nice that even though the demand for these spaces is high, some of these studios are making a conscious effort to include other perks like easy equipment rental, transportation, and food services to give themselves a leg up but also allows the leaser to have improved conditions for their crew and workers. Given all the strife in the film industry over the last few months the little stuff that these companies can do to aid their employees and improve working conditions must be appreciated. I knew there were a lot of soundstages in LA but over 300 was not the number I was expecting. The concentration of them is just staggering to me. Hopefully streaming behemoths like Netflix and Disney Plus will continue to provide a large number of jobs for these LA soundstage workers.
I think I am struggling to understand exactly why there is an increase in occupancy for soundstages. Before the pandemic began, productions were still happening and studio spaces were being leased out so I am just trying to understand how the pandemic has shifted the focus to soundstages, in addition to the already prevailing studios where stuff used to filmed earlier.
I have always thought that soundstages are necessary parts of any set, because of how to enables acoustics and spoken dialogue to be recorded in a way. But I am also wondering why, when they had almost been out of use, for what purpose are they being used. Like are they being used in the traditional sense of a sounstage or are they being used as additional space to add to a set. I think it was either the language of the article or just my lack of knowledge about this topic that is leading to all this confusion in my brain.
It sounds like this is a good problem to have. It’s interesting to me the new business model of making the soundstage an all encompassing service with stuff like food and lighting as extra onsite capabilities. It’s surprising to me that this hasn’t been done before as the standard because it seems like if you could keep rental equipment right there onite then you’d have potentially simpler and faster turnaround times. The first thing I thought when I saw the photo of the new fab sound stages in the article was that they look like hotels. They have that same aesthetic as the chain hotels and I was surprised that they didn’t mention having onsite sleeping arrangements. It is interesting that the different soundstage companies are trying out these services when it sounds like there’s already a short supply of just the soundstages themselves and you could probably get away with just doing that for the time being.
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