(Above) An aerial view of Feld Studio's 46-acre campus; (left) Kenneth Feld and his daughter Juliette Feld inside the costume shop at Feld Studios. (VT Photo)
REPORTING FROM ELLENTON, FLA. — The new Feld Studios are almost complete, with 350 employees now operating out of the gigantic complex here and more expected over the coming weeks and months.
“It’s the first time we’ve had the company under one roof,” said Kenneth Feld during a tour of his new 46-acre campus. The entire building footprint stretches over 600,000 square feet, but the jewel of the facility is a 50,000-sq.-ft. production and rehearsal space. Soon, Executive VP and Producer Juliette Feld will be hanging huge installations from Feld Studios' 500,000-lb. capacity rig during rehearsals of Marvel Universe Live!, but for now a one-inch scale model is the only hint of what this incredible show will look like.
“This is by far the most complex production we have ever attempted,” said Kenneth Feld. “For this show, we’ve brought in every discipline we’ve ever known.”
“And some we haven’t,” joked daughter Juliette Feld, who had just wrapped up an internal webcast of the production to Feld staffers from one of Feld Studios' many facilities.
In May 2012, Kenneth Feld purchased the former Seimens industrial plant for $8.5 million, spending millions more to completely gut and rebuild the factory, and relocate his staff to Ellenton, a small city in central Florida, about an hour south of Tampa and a half-hour north of Sarasota.
Besides an outlet shopping center and a few strip malls, there’s not much to Ellenton, at least not yet. City officials are hoping Feld Studios kicks off a new period of economic development in the area and, for now, several hotels in nearby Bradenton offer access to seafood restaurants and waterfront eateries.
Kenneth Feld hopes that other touring shows see the value of Feld Studios' massive rehearsal space and its 3,000 amps/3-Phase show power electrical hookups, state-of-the-art climate control and LED lighting and wireless connectivity. But for now, the focus is on developing the Marvel Universe Live show, kicking off July10 at Tampa Bay Times Forum, before heading off to PNC Arena in Raleigh, N.C. The arena spectacular is currently booked through May 2016 with additional dates to be added later.
“It’s an original story with more Marvel characters than have ever been assembled any place live in the world,” Kenneth Feld said. “It’s also the first time that many of these characters have interacted together.”
A tour of the Ellenton facility is a tour of Marvel Universe Live in development, with designers drafting up merchandise prototypes, mechanics creating customized motorcycles, stage and costume designers developing the look of the show and dozens of technicians trying to engineer their way through Marvel Universe Live’s complex production design. Indexing Feld’s huge collection of sound and light equipment is itself a daunting task in organization.
“We own all our own equipment and once we acquire it, the equipment comes here for assembly, cabling and refurbishment,” Kenneth Feld said. “I think we’re the largest owner of chain motors in the world. If we weren’t before, we certainly will be”after Marvel Universe Live has been fully staged. An order of 108 new chain motors had just arrived the day prior.
Those chain motors will be installed on Feld’s 55-foot high rigging grid, “and when we’re building a stage set, we can get it exactly how high it will be in a venue and properly label it, assemble it, wire it and cable it,” said Scott Dickerson, VP of Florida Operations & Show Support at the building. “We assemble very large sets and, in the past, they would have had to have been assembled in stages. Now because of the ceiling height we can put the whole set together at once.
The idea is to work out the bugs before rehearsals begin, Juliette Feld said, adding “we want to troubleshoot as many things as possible because rehearsal time is so precious,” she said.
Feld Studios also includes a second 22,900-sq.-ft. rehearsal space without a massive rigging grid, as well as a third unfinished rehearsal space, large enough to hold an ice floor for Disney on Ice rehearsals. When the spaces are not being used for Feld Productions, Kenneth Feld said he plans to keep the facility busy — a few weeks prior, an ESPN crew had rented the space to film a television commercial.
“We’re doing the largest shows in the world, so if we can rehearse here satisfactorily, production fits the criteria for everyone else. We’re not rehearsing 52 weeks a year, so when we’re not using the facility, other companies can use the space to rehearse or shoot commercials.”
The real value, Kenneth Feld added, “is that we can build your show, you can rehearse it here,” and because of the proximity to Feld’s massive production design space, “if there are any problems, you can fix it overnight.”
Interviewed for this article: Kenneth and Juliette Feld & Scott Dickerson, (941) 721-1233