Workspace

Chip McKenney: Hi. Troika Design Group. It's our building, it's our offices. We have 10,000 sq. ft. here on Melrose Avenue. We are sort of in Hollywood, but we are little bit on the edge of Hollywood as well and we chose this location primarily because it's centrally located mostly for our workers. So I will take you through it. The first building, is as I said the studios, consist of 10,000 square feet. What's interesting about the facility is it's actually three separate buildings that have been co-joined over the years. This was originally a restaurant. I am going to take you over to what we call the East Building, which is all the offices, the production offices, and that was a doctor's office. So here, this is where all the producers, coordinators, the executive producers sit as well. So this is like all the organizational part of the company. I can walk you down introduce you to some people. Okay, let me introduce you to Kristen Olsen, who is Troika's Executive Producer. Kristen runs the entire Production Department. And you supervise how many producers? Kristen Olsen: Eight to 12 producers depending on how many projects we have going. Producers, associate producers, coordinators, we have a full staff. Chip McKenney: In other words, every single project, Kristen is involved in it. So she is the power. Be very nice to her. So this building, which again, is called the East Building, this is an interesting building. It's got separate offices for all the producers. Some are large enough to share, which when it is large enough we do; most of them are not. You can actually see like I said, this used to be a doctor's office. I think this was like the doctor's reception area where they used to walk in and a lot of these rooms were the exam rooms. Oh! Caught us in time for breakfast. This middle building is probably the most open building, open space that we have in this studio. It's used for reception, it's used for a lounge, it's used for a kitchen. We also have operations over there and we have some design studios there. This is one you can see, when I talk about it, it used to be a restaurant. This is actually the original kitchen from the restaurant, which we think is a very cool thing. So this part, of course, is where we eat and every day we would bring in lunch primarily because it allows us to hang out together in a relaxed time and I bet if you asked everybody here, they will probably have a different idea of what the best food is, but let me see if I get somebody's attention. Heather! What type of food do you like when we order here for lunch? Heather: Daphne's. Chip McKenney: What? Heather: Daphne's. Chip McKenney: I don't know what the hell that is. What? Free --? Heather: Greek. Chip McKenney: Oh! Greek. Chip McKenney: Dale, do you have a favorite food? Dale: Salmon. Chip McKenney: It's...? Oh! Oh! He is such a liar, he complains everyday. Wow! So we also have in this center building we have two large bays where we work in groups and we have separated them by design and by animation. Let me take you in the Design bay first and the whole idea behind this is that everybody sort of feeds off everybody else's creativity, so that people see what other people are working on and they sort of jump up and give opinions and sort of share the project. You can see along the sides we have chalkboards-- well not chalkboards, corkboards, and these corkboards is where we put up images and people can sort of step back and get a perspective on them and see if it's going in the right direction. Okay, so you have seen the center building. Now we are going to take you take you to the East or actually the West building. I will show you the jewel in the crown, this is our machine room, we are very proud of it. We are networked, so every station can be accessed from any other station and it's all centralized through this machine room. And we have a Director of Technology, Rich Feldman, he is like amazing and so this is his baby and he is a total tech geek. He loves all the latest and the greatest, which is good because we sort of aspire to always be on the cutting edge of technology. So this building, this is where the Creative Director sits. We also have a 3D bay here and we are back to two Creative offices. Dale Everett: One of the things in my office is we put up corkboards and it's a place where we can do white boarding on projects which we start to kind of, you know, in the initial stages we start to figure out what we are going to do. A lot of times for certain projects we will do competitive landscapes reviews and we'll have this up during the course of our production. So we always sort of make sure that we are kind of working in the right space. Chip McKenney: One other area that's pretty much essential hub to our studio, of course, is the reference wall. This sort of represents research and it represents people's interests and it represents a number of people who have collectively donated to the collection of books that we have. Well, thanks for visiting us. I was glad to give you the tour. We think that the space really reflects Troika. We think it's young, we think it's sexy, it's comfortable for us and it generates a great vibe that we think contributes significantly to our creativity. Thanks for coming by.