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St. Pete media and film production company buys warehouse to build advanced studios
St. Pete-based Litewave Media, a production company known for working on local films, has purchased a warehouse that it will repurpose for additional and advanced studio space.
The group purchased an 11,412-square-foot office warehouse at 9850 16th St. N. in a $1.4 million deal on July 30, and also took out a $1.12 million mortgage for the purchase.
The light industrial warehouse, near Jabil and the former Minor League Baseball HQ, was the HQ for telecommunications cabling provider ComDesign.
“We’ve been looking for a site for five years,” Litewave Media Holdings CEO Christian Cashmir told the St. Pete Catalyst.
Cashmir says his company is outgrowing its current office spaces in St. Pete and needed to find a larger space to build additional studios.
Litewave Media has an office on Black Lion Drive and a studio at Roosevelt Boulevard. The group also has a satellite Tampa office on Ashley Drive.
Litewave Media has worked on a number of productions including music videos for the Australian rock band AC/DC, whose lead singer Brian Johnson lives in Sarasota; National Geographic’s Drain The Oceans series; and the Summer of Soul documentary film, which won both the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.
The plan would be to construct three new studios in the warehouse in the next two months and have the fourth studio in the warehouse in 2022.
Cashmir said the company will keep its existing and new spaces for the time being.
The fourth studio would have advanced LED technology.
“The LED technology makes backgrounds more realistic compared to the traditional green screen, you can create entire worlds. We are going to be the first in St. Pete to have this technology,” Cashmir said.
LED technology was used for the popular Disney show The Mandalorian, which is one of the first major productions to choose LED walls over green screens.