Home Theater $75K-$150K Silver Winner

The goal for this award-winning theater was to create a space that was truly unique and custom by design.  This theater includes state-of-the-art audio/visual equipment, glowing pillars with glass-beaded panels, and a giant oval with built-in lighting in the ceiling.  It was a great experience collaborating with Admit One Cinema and interior designer Annie Tropple on this project.

Additional Links

Time-lapse video of the theater being constructed -

http://www.designedandmade.com/2012/08/09/ultimate-party-inviteguerilla-marketing/

Behind the scenes video featuring Lance Anderson of Admit One Cinema and designer Annie Tropple-

http://www.designedandmade.com/2012/12/16/movie-theater-scenes-video/

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Video Credits:

Music by Deltron3030
Monitor lift by Admit One Cinema
Interior Design by Annie Tropple
Photography by Justin Bullis

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This is a short little pitch video I put together for one of the editors at Fine Woodworking. The beginning part of the video was filmed on the iPhone about a month ago, but the furniture spin at the end is from 2010.  The wood lock was something I saw on Matthias Wandel’s website.  I thought it would be fun to incorporate it into a piece of furniture and have it control a hidden drawer.  The video below shows what I came up with.

Showing Mike Prom this dresser is what got us talking about how we were going to take the hidden drawer concept to the next level.  That evening we started sketching the custom bookcase and its elaborate hidden drawer mechanism.

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2013 Reader’s Choice Winner!

Each year MinnLocal.com and Minnesota Sun Newspapers conduct a reader’s choice poll giving consumers a voice to show which community businesses they felt performed the best during that year.

Readers submit nominations for this award, and a 3rd party totals the results. Everything ranging from restaurants to doctors is evaluated in this poll.  Needless to say, when I found out my company was rated the best cabinet shop for the second year in a row, I was thrilled!

Video Credits:

Filming by Joshua VP and Brian Grabski
Editing and Color by Brian Grabski
Home Theater by Admit One Cinema
Interior Design by Annie Tropple
Custom Woodworking by Brian Grabski
Music by Necro – Poetry in the Streets

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Video Credits

Filming by Joshua VP and Brian Grabski
Editing and Color by Joshua VP
CAD drawings and animations by Mike Prom
Robotics by Peter Kerwin
Music by Mexicans with Guns – Death and Rebirth

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This project was a collaborative effort between Peter Kerwin, Joshua VP and Brian Grabski, with special thanks to Kyle Pettis for loaning us his beautiful copy of Rembrandt’s Lucreacia.

 How we pulled this shot off:

1. To keep the lighting consistent, we covered all of the windows with tin foil.  We had several “day light” fluorescent bulbs set up on stands that provided consistent lighting throughout the two weeks the flowers were blooming.  That lighting setup works great for multi-day shots because the fluorescent bulbs stay cool.
2. The camera is controlled by an intervalometer.  Each time the camera takes a picture, a red LED light on the back of the camera illuminates.  This light lets you know that the shutter is open.  (For this shot, we took 3-bracketed images every third minute.)
3. An Arduino Duemilanove controls the whole operation. We taped a photoresistor (a simple light sensor) over the camera’s LED light. The photoresistor reacts to the light emitted from the LED, and creates a signal that the Arduino board can measure when the LED turns on. Each time the camera’s shutter opens while capturing an image, the Arduino board knows it.
4. As soon as the Arduino board receives the signal that a photo has been taken, we programmed it to wait for 60 seconds–this delay was added to ensure that the dolly will not move while the shutter is open for long exposures. After receiving the signal from the camera and waiting, the Arduino board activates a high capacity H-bridge called a Spike for five seconds.
5. The Spike then powers a 2 RPM gear motor connected to the winch. The winch either pulls or lowers the dolly up or down the curved pipe tracks, which are mounted on top of fully adjustable saw horses. The gear motor runs at a fixed speed, so the duration of its runtime determines how far the dolly will move between shots.
6. The robotic control of the dolly manages two variables: the frequency of the shots (set by the intervalometer) and the distance covered by the dolly between each shot (set by the Arduino board). Because the track length is fixed and the runtime of the gear motor determines the distance the dolly moves between shots, the run time essentially dictates how many images the camera will take while traversing the track. A consistent number of images means that the length of the final video will depend only on the runtime of the winch. Thus if we want to create a 10 second time lapse with shots covering three hours or ten days, we only need to adjust the intervalometer. This greatly simplifies the field programming of the dolly.

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