A new studio facility in an 800-square-foot space on Manhattan’s West 14th Street is targeting sound design and mixing for indie films.

If you’re reading carefully, you’ve already noticed several problems with that sentence. First is the location. (Since when is West 14th Street a hot spot for film production or post?) Next is the size. (Eight hundred square feet may be big for a New York City apartment, but it’s not much room for a full-service studio.) Last is the very idea of such a place. (Does New York need more options for feature post work?)

But nobody told Ovà¤sen Music and Tandem Sound principals Eric Offin and Mark Garcia those were problems. The two had been freelancers, but decided to go it on their own, shoehorning a makeshift 5.1 mix room into an upstairs space at the corner of 14th and Sixth Avenue, where they quickly found themselves specializing in down-and-dirty – but imaginative and expressive – sound design for feature films and commercials. Before long, filmmakers like Todd Solondz (who mixed Palindromes there) and Phil Morrison (Junebug) became clients, and Offin and Garcia realized they had to ratchet up their technology and develop a fully designed space where high-end creative clients could feel comfortable.

They leased out a larger 800-square-foot space on the second floor of the building, then shared their list of requirements for the new facility with the Walters-Storyk Design Group, which specializes in studio architecture.

“It was a struggle to get it built,” said architect John Storyk, who said he approached the job like he was designing a tight “cabinet” that needed to house three very small but fully isolated rooms, two of them with enough room for Digidesign Icon mixing consoles and couches for client seating. One of the tricks was to make the absolute most of the space available. To that end, the HD projectors in the control rooms (driven by QuickTime files, not tape decks) are actually perched inside a niche outside of and above the control room itself, shining down through a glass window toward the screen at the front of the room. There’s no room for a large plasma screen inside the iso booth itself, so the panel was mounted instead on the opposite wall of the corridor that provides access to all three rooms, so the VO talent can see the big screen out the window. (Some prefer to use a smaller screen inside the room itself.) A window at the back of the building was converted to a door that opens onto a tiny balcony, giving the whole space a slightly Continental feel.

Click here to see studio architect John Storyk's PDF of the Ovà¤sen Music & Tandem Sound floorplan.

Because the mixing rooms are so small, Storyk said maintaining consistent sound from front to back was an issue. “The boundaries are rigid, which means that the client sitting in the back of the room will struggle with low-frequency build-up,” he explained. The problem was addressed by bringing in a brand-new product from Bag End Loudspeakers, the electronic bass trap – or the E-Trap for short – to electronically absorb low frequencies in the room. A loaner E-Trap is already in use in one of the control rooms, and Ovasen has dibs on the first four shipping products, which will be installed two per room. [www.bagend.com/Etrap.htm]

Offin reports that the business has quickly evolved to focus on 35mm features. Kelly Reichardt’s acclaimed festival hit Old Joy, now in theatrical release, was sound-designed and mixed there, and the studio also handled the concert documentary loudQUIETloud: A Film About the Pixies, which offered an unusual challenge – the sound elements were mainly live stereo soundboard recordings, with no audience tracks at all. To make the audio “film ready,” lots of work had to be done using sound effects libraries and Foley work to recreate the cacophonous crowd noise that attends a live performance. Ovà¤sen had just seven days to finish the job before the film’s premiere at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, TX. “One of the hardest parts of this mix was not blowing up the speakers,” Offin said. “It just felt right to always turn it up.”

More current projects include a Rosario Dawson-produced film tentatively titled Descent, Lake City starring Sissy Spacek, and The Skeptic, starring Tom Arnold.