Resources
Milburn House
Formerly home to the CAPITAL Centre, then Theatre and Performance studies, Milburn House is one of the strangest buildings on campus. We fairly regularly use G55, as one of the two centrally timetabled drama studios (alongside Avon), with G56 and G57 providing nice white-walled rehearsal/studio spaces.
G55
Technical Information
As a purpose built drama space, the room offers a lot of useful amenities (very similar to FAB studios, just a bit older).
Most visible is the lighting grid accessible by tension grid, which is hard patched to 24 channels of Zero88 Chilli Pro dimmers. Annoyingly we can't use this (lore to be added), so it just sits there. There are other nice things you can use though!
The shiny power sockets around the room marked "DB Clean" don't actually work. You have to use the normal sockets.
The room has 4 passive speakers rigged up on the lighting grid, with 2 processor/amps for them in the booth. There's also some DMX splitters in there. The tech equipment in the booth runs off a dedicated consumer unit, which can be powered on with the switch at floor level. Annoyingly, switching it on with this seems to trip the breaker for the sockets the amps and DMX splitters are on (presumable from inrush current on the amps). For this reason I wouldn't recommend using the rigged speakers for a show unless you're particularly familiar with how everything there works.
Patch Panels
At some point between March and November 2024 the patch panel was vandalised, with the XLR patch being ripped out and cut back by a metre. This makes much of the info below no longer relevant. The DMX, Comms, and Video lines are still intact.
Around the room there are 4 wall panels. These all tie in to patch panels in the control booth.
| Name | Location (facing the projector screen) | In/Out Tie Lines (Male & Female XLR) | Tie Lines (Female XLR) | DMX In/Out | Video (BNC) | Comms | SpeakON |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lectern | 1-4 | 1-4 | 1 | 1-2 | A, B | 1-2 |
| 2 | Front Right | 5-8 | 5-8 | 2 | 3-4 | A, B | 3-4 |
| 3 | Rear Right (by entrance) | 9-12 | 9-12 | 3 | 5-6 | A, B | 5-6 |
| 4 | Rear Left | 13-16 | 13-16 | 4 | 7-8 | A, B | 7-8 |
As access to the control booth is pretty restricted, the patch is setup in a way to be generally useful for how shows happen in there. Tie lines 9-12 are patched into amp channels 1-4 (though see above for notes on this). 9 and 10 on the bidirectional ones are patched across to 1 and 2, going across to the lectern panel so you can use the AV services speakers. We have some cursed single XLR to 3.5mm cables for this, so you can run sound from the back of the room to the lectern 3.5mm input (we do this for Panto).
G56 and G57
These rooms are rehearsal spaces with white walls. The sizes are a bit awkward as they're quite long and narrow vs the more square shape of G55. G56 is a bit worse as it doesn't have the double height ceiling the other rooms have. These rooms have no particular technical installations other than all having a 63amp 3-phase socket if you ever need lots of power.
G57 in particular is not likely to be at risk as a room as the University marketing team do all their photo and video shoots in there - keep an eye out in promo videos and you can recognise the distinctive patterns of the ventilation system.
Building History
As mentioned above, Milburn houses G55, a fully fitted drama studio with tension grid, many dimmers, patching, etc... G53 used to be a mirror image of G55 until it got turned into a physics lab in 2023. As a consequence, the control booth is split into two, one room for each studio, though the window to G53 has been boarded over and the dimmer disconnected.
Elsewhere in the building is a wing that was the former home of Film and TV studies, another area that was created for Warwick Writing Programme, as well as the the physics NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) facility.
Milburn House was originally a distribution warehouse before the University took it over as space to do anything with, which is why it's so weird. There was a great video explaining this (as a big sustainability success story), but it seems to have disappeared so you'll just have to trust me on this one...
After the arts and humanities departments moved to the FAB, much of this space became vacant in 2022. This led to a speedy space grab (as Warwick has a chronic shortage of space...) and now it houses a bunch of physics department spaces (mostly astro), some engineering space, and some obscure centrally timetabled rooms. Most of it seems like an unloved child of the uni, with none of the space making sense - with some very inconsistent one-way card access routes to get to certain parts of the building.
During the early stages of the STEM Connect programme, the architects had Milburn House marked out on the new plans. When asked if they had any plans for it (e.g. refurbs), they said they had no actually plans and knew nothing about the building, but had been told they could use it as overspill space for anything they couldn't fit in the main development...
The one part of the building that continues to receive investment is the NMR halls, which apparently have the most powerful instruments in the country as a "National Research Facility". In 2020 they added a 1 GHz spectrometer, and a 1.2 GHz one in 2024. I have no idea what this means but it costs a lot and sounds impressive (and is very entertaining to have next to a drama studio). It is also annoying (as of Term 1 2024) as the building work blocks off the cut-through to Westwood.