A side project has been turning my part time work cubicle into the Macrodata Refinement department from the TV show Severance, which I think is just an exquisitely made piece of art. Studying the set by production designer Jeremy Hindle, and finding actual objects used by the set dresser Andrew Baseman (or, trying to recreate them), has been an education in set design and cinematography. I also expanded my knowledge into new areas for me, like building custom mechanical keyboards and corporate office furniture.

The most recent addition is from outside of MDR scenes, but a key prop: the speaker through which Mark wakes up Helly, and later is the communication device for the Board.

I couldn’t find anything that looked exactly like it, not knowing precisely what the object might be in the real world, or if it was made from scratch. The closest I came were mid-century desktop speakers for phones. There’s a range of them.

They are plentiful on Ebay, and way back in February I bought a Western Electric Bell System 760A speaker, probably early 1970s. It didn’t have the grooves on the sides, and wasn’t as wide but it had the basic minimalist shape with curved corners and a full perforated metal grill. And, wiring intact. I didn’t know if it would still work, but I would rig something up for my plan to have it running crackling audio in my cubicle for Halloween.

I cleaned it up, gave all the plastic a fine sand, hammered out some dents in the grill face, and then went to spray painting it. This Krylon Fusion satin white which is suppose to act as a primer and paint for plastic did a good job. It was a little harder to find a good blue, as the blues are so specific in the show, but I like what I ended up finding.

It was particularly nice getting a Bell Systems original, seeing that a large character in the show is the Lumon building, portrayed by the awesome Bell Labs (now Bell Works) in Holmdel, New Jersey (which I’ve visited, of course.)

Somehow I lost the photos of the guts, but it turned out the ancient speaker did still work. Evgeni hooked it up to a bluetooth receiver for me, and I edited a 1 hour recording from the first scene of the series with Mark’s voice asking “Who are you?” every now and then, interspersed with random static. I played it off of my iPad hidden in a cabinet. The speaker had very low volume at the highest I could get it, but that was ok for this project as I didn’t want to completely irritate or terrify my cubicle neighbors.

Here it is set in the cubicle.

And with the Halloween set up, which also included a glowing red down arrow to the Testing Floor. It did the job of startling a couple of my Severance-aware co-workers.

I added the black velvet walls for a day. You can hear the audio at the end of this video tour.