Behind Brooklyn Walls: A World of Sound
Oliver Lief inside Blue Table Post, his postproduction facility in Brooklyn. Editing is currently being done on the new film about Lizzie Borden featuring Chloë Sevigny and Kristen Stewart. Credit James Estrin/The New York Times
While the first two floors of his building are devoted to editing, Mr. Lief lives with his family on the top three. Credit James Estrin/The New York Times
On the bottom floor, workers hand-excavated a space five and a half feet below ground, which helps keep street sounds out, creating “acoustic isolation,” in Mr. Lief’s terms. While digging, the construction crew came upon a cannonball dating from the Battle of Brooklyn, which Mr. Lief intends to display in a special case.
Each studio, whether specially designed for editing, sound mixing or color grading, is a floating room-built-within-a-room. “They create space and gaps around each room so that the vibrations don’t carry,” Mr. Lief explained. Each is also painted a certain shade — “15 percent gray” — with matching gray curtains on the windows, so that the eye is not influenced by the colors around it when doing color grading on a project. Every room has temperature controls and computer-activated lighting.
Two of the rooms, the 3-D Dolby Atmos Mix Room and the vocal booth, were built with no right angles (the floors and ceilings are slightly slanted) to keep sound from bouncing around; dark synthetic fabric covers the fiberglass-insulated walls. The last room, which may be completed this month, still needs to be furnished and hooked up to the central machine room, which stores computers, audio equipment, network switches, and drives containing audio and video files.
But the high-tech designs and equipment are not the only thing drawing producers, who have been swarming over from Manhattan to check out the new studio. When you walk in, a fireplace, oil paintings and midcentury modern furniture, including a very comfortable couch, are there to greet you. Mr. Lief has lived here since buying the building in 1996, so he has had plenty of time to make it homey; the business’s name is taken from the family’s blue-glazed lava kitchen table upstairs.
When Ms. Streep was working here, she ate lunch most days at a wood-and-steel table in the garden, with the crew. “I offered to have her stay with us, because I know she lives in Connecticut, but she has an apartment downtown, too,” Mr. Lief said.
Ms. Dennett, who was particularly fond of the unicorn pillow on the mixing room couch, said the place was much more comfortable than most studios. “It’s like home and so warm,” she said.
“I don’t ever want to leave,” Mr. Poon, her associate, said. When someone suggested that he stay the night, he shrugged and said, “Believe me, I would if I could.”
