New Studio Opening: “Dungeon Beach” Audio/Video Post Comes to Brooklyn
Dungeon Beach Studios is aptly-named. To enter, you must first find a nondescript steel door on an industrial stretch of North 3rd Street, just a few blocks from Williamsburg’s main strip.
From there, you descend into a spartan cement basement, dreary and austere, and walk a few paces to find a second drab door. When this inner portal opens, the scene suddenly changes and you’re inside a handsomely-appointed new space, all bright wood and fine finishing, that sits like a refreshing little oasis in an otherwise severe concrete desert.
Dungeon Beach would be a beautiful set of rooms no matter where it was built, but in this location it’s particularly striking. The studios have a comfortable-yet-boutiquey feel that make it seem like the kind of place you’d expect to find around SoHo in Manhattan – not up the block from Wythe Street, Brooklyn, near the edge of the East River.
It’s not just the décor that will remind you of a posh Manhattan space, however. It’s the capabilities of the place as well. Brooklyn (and Williamsburg in particular) has been ground zero for an explosion of new recording studios for well over a decade. But it hasn’t been until just recently that the post houses have begun moving in. And Dungeon Beach has helped to set a new bar on that front.
There are two main studios inside the facility, one of them dedicated to audio, with a 5.1 Dynaudio monitoring system inside its lofty and finely-tuned control room and an extra-large viewing screen mounted high on the wall. There’s a 16-in/16-out Burl Mothership and an assortment of boutique and home-made mics for tracking, and in DB’s large live room there’s space enough for a piano, a drum-kit and perhaps a dozen players at once. Rounding it out is an attached voiceover booth and a full-fledged Foley pit for sound-design sessions.
The Audio “A” room at Dungeon Beach
Just down the hall, there’s a second studio, as open and airy as the first. It houses an enormous cinema screen and projector, calibrated for use in color correction, with a complement of specialized film and video equipment that might be practically unique in the borough. There’s a small C-room as well, which sits on the opposite end of the suite – suited for editing, ADR or small-scale music production.
Dungeon Beach seems like an ambitious build, and it took five young partners to bring it about: Keller McDivitt, a Nashville-transplant with a passion for DIY equipment-building and room-tuning; J Ruffalo, a classically-trained composer turned pop and hip-hop producer; Tim Korn, an engineer who specialized in music before finding increasing opportunities in audio post; Steve Robbins, who manages the space; and Ian Bloom, a cinematographer who found himself disappointed by his experiences at expensive, sometimes disconcertingly-nonchalant Manhattan post houses, and grew intent on building a dedicated space of his own for color correction.
McDivitt, who took the lead in designing the audio side of Dungeon Beach, focuses mostly on music production, but he says their clientele on that end is split down the middle between bands and film & video projects. Work here has been driven by the in-house staff so far, but they’re open to freelancers as well. The room seems a natural choice for mixers who needs access to a comfortable and well-calibrated 5.1 listening environment in the area.
Similarly, Bloom, who heads up the video side, was surprised to find that his new screening room didn’t just attract producers looking to book time with the staff, but also freelance colorists and editors interested in trying their own hand at color correction on equipment that can be cost-prohibitive to work with over in Manhattan.
Color Theater
Still, the crew at Dungeon Beach didn’t select their space based on price. There are few deals left to be had in Williamsburg anyway – especially this close to the Bedford strip.
Instead, the motivation was to build where they and their clients were comfortable. As New York’s creative culture continues on its long exodus into Brooklyn, fewer musicians and filmmakers can be bothered leaving their beloved borough to slog through Manhattan just to get some work done. Many of Dungeon Beach’s clients come from within the surrounding neighborhood, or ferry over from DUMBO.
I asked McDivitt what attracted him to this location in particular. Beaming, he answered: “I can walk here from my house.”
Justin Colletti is a Brooklyn-based audio engineer, college professor, and journalist. He records and mixes all over NYC, masters at JLM, teaches at CUNY, is a regular contributor to SonicScoop, and edits the music blog Trust Me, I’m A Scientist.
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