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4 Post • January 2010 www.postmagazine.com Bits & Pieces N EW YORK — NYU's Depar tment of Music and Performing Ar ts at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development (www.steinhardt.nyu.edu/music) has unveiled its new audio teaching facility. Located on the sixth floor of its West 4th Street building in Man- hattan, the 7,500-square-foot space includes an audio research lab, a 10.2 surround sound studio and a control room with seating for 25 students. The centerpiece of the space is a new recording studio that's dedicated to James L. Dolan — a mem- ber of the dean's council and the president/CEO of media company Cablevision. The room is outfitted with a 48-channel Solid State Logic Duality console and a custom 10.2 surround monitoring solution from Dangerous Music. Gensler and the Walters-Storyk Design Group de- signed the multi-function space, in which labs can be conver ted to isolation booths or smaller recording rooms as project demands change.The complex's im- mersive audio lab boasts 16 Genelec speaker on a re- configurable overhead grid, along with two Genelec subwoofers. Here, students can experiment with creat- ing soundtracks for theme parks, museums or other in- teractive venues. The facility is predomi- nantly Mac based, and its lab workstations are loaded with applications that in- clude Digidesign Pro Tools, MOTU Digital Performer and Apple Logic. WSDG architect John Storyk says the project took two years to complete, from planning through final con- struction. On a tour of the space, he noted the trans- parency of the design, which allows natural light to flow through rooms and hallways into the sixth floor's internal rooms. He also pointed out the sixth floor's low ceilings, which challenged the design team with containing low-frequencies. Final cost of the build is somewhere around $6.5 million, and NYU students will begin using the space in earnest this spring. By Marc Loftus The new recording studio features a 48-channel SSL Duality board and a custom 10.2 monitoring system from Dangerous Music. Right Now What Post readers are experiencing MUSIC/TV/BOOKS: "I'm listening to UK hipsters Chew Lips, deal- ing with my addiction to Battlestar Gallactica, and I just completed the entire True Blood book series!" — Meredith Machial Executive Producer Resident, NYC NYU opens new audio teaching facility N EW YORK — VFX and color grading studio Nice Shoes (www.niceshoes. com) has added to its core business by merging with sister design and animation com- pany Freestyle Collective (FSC). The Freestyle Collective brand name will cease to exist, as the studio continues to operate under the Nice Shoes brand. Nice Shoes gains a creative talent as a result of the merger, with creative director Victor Newman and executive producer Maribeth Phillips joining the team. The creative depar tment will be orga- nized into separate design and VFX departments. Newman will creative direct design projects, while Nice Shoes CD Aron Baxter will continue to oversee VFX. Phillips will take over as EP of the design and VFX depar tments, freeing Pat Por tela to focus her efforts as EP for color grading. Freestyle Collective's recent work includes de- sign for American Express, Starbucks, JetBlue, Samsung, Hallmark, Avon, Crest, and Dir t Devil. The design studio has also worked with networks such as Car toon Network, VH1, BET, MTV, Com- edy Central and Nickelodeon. Nice Shoes expands core business 3 Dart creates animated Pregnancy series E XTON, PA — Animation studio 3 Dar t (www.3-dar t.net) com- pleted work on seven animated medical videos for Babycenter.com's Inside Pregnancy series. The Website is an online resource for expecting mothers and the videos are designed to be informative, de- tailing the different stages of a pregnancy. The animations help visualize what the mother will experience, how the baby's gender is determined and how the baby develops from week to week. 3 Dar t used Autodesk 3DS Max for most of the modeling and animation. Light- ing and rendering was handled in Mental Ray. Autodesk XSI was also used for model- ing, including the baby's umbilical cord dy- namics, and for adding weight. The studio called on Zbrush for sculpting and texturing. Adobe Photoshop was also used for textur- ing. Compositing took place in After Effects.