Most Los Angeles post-production houses are no-frills affairs. They offer a single specialty, such as tape editing, and are usually tucked away in a dim warehouse.

Three post-production companies in Santa Monica decided to go a different route.

Voodoo Effects and Graphics, Crush Editorial and Stompbox Music and Sound Design have banded together to create a one-stop post-production shop. Voodoo creates special effects and graphic overlays for ads and movies; Crush edits videotape and film; and Stompbox composes, mixes and integrates audio with the visuals in ads and movies.

The newly consolidated company’s mantra is straightforward: Give a client greater creative freedom by offering all services needed to make an ad, movie sequence or television spot under one roof. The three sister companies, all wholly owned by Santa Monica-based parent AdVenture Inc., have retained their individual names to emphasize the range of their work.

“Voodoo/Crush represents a new and very intelligent trend in post production by combining services,” said client Thom Tyson, executive producer at Plum Productions in Santa Monica. “They offer one-stop shopping, which is incredibly attractive.”

After years of observing clients’ frustrations over running from one specialty house to another to create a finished product, AdVenture’s management team decided the industry was ready for a change.

“We saw that the problem in the post-production world is that you edit your tape in one place, then go rent a room elsewhere to do effects, and then find another place to put together the audio reel,” said Glen Martin, Crush Editorial’s executive producer and co-head of Stompbox. “If you end up changing concepts mid-process, you have to start the race all over again. By bringing it all together in-house, a client has better control over a product and less of a headache.”

Martin emphasized that his company does not employ “Jacks of all trades,” but instead brings together specialists. Voodoo/Crush now has more than 20 full-time employees, plus 10 freelancers who come in as needed for specific projects.

Martin along with AdVenture owner Chris Kern and Voodoo co-founder and Stompbox co-head Steve Weber designed Voodoo/Crush’s shop space themselves with creative interaction in mind. Editing bays, graphics rooms and the music studio are closely arranged along the periphery of the ground floor.

“The film editors, the effects guys and the even the music composers are all one door away from each other,” said Connie Newberry, director of broadcasting at WestWayne Advertising, a Voodoo/Crush client. “The interactivity forms a more creative atmosphere because we can all exchange ideas as the ad develops.”

The rest of the building is similarly unconventional, boasting funky curvilinear couches, open meeting spaces and pinball machines.

“We are very against long hallways,” Weber said. “There isn’t a long corridor to be found here. Over our years in the industry, I think we all got tired of running up and down. It was wasted energy and wasted time.”

By keeping all the elements of a project under one roof, down time and conceptual problems can be minimized.

“It sounds clich & #233;, but in this industry, when you save time, you save money,” Newberry said. “By having the same team working on the various elements, it cuts down on miscommunication between, say, the editors and effects designers. You can weed out rejects before too much time goes into the idea, and an advertisement can come together pretty smoothly.”

Advertising constitutes about 90 percent of the company’s business. Voodoo/Crush has worked on ads for such companies as Kirin Beer, Samsung and El Torito, with big ad agencies including Hal Riney & Associates and Grey Advertising.

With the consolidation, the company hopes to attract more feature film business. Currently, Voodoo editors are working on special effects for one of the summer blockbuster movies. (They declined to say which one, citing a nondisclosure agreement.) However, Martin emphasized that Voodoo/Crush has no intention of becoming a full feature house and wants to retain its emphasis on ad work.

“We have a lot of fun with ads,” said Martin, who began his career as a producer at an agency before helping launch Crush Editorial. “We get to try different things, and it’s just a little more exciting (than movie work).”

Kern reports that, while only 2 months old, the consolidated company has already seen an increase in clients and business. He declined to cite specific figures, but said the company’s revenues are in the “multimillion-dollar” range.

Competition is intense in the crowded industry, and Voodoo/Crush executives, painfully aware of that, intend to distinguish themselves from the pack through exhaustive customer service and creative innovation.

“We know that there is a huge amount of competition in this industry,” Kern said. “But we’re in a situation where we can cultivate new creative ideas and techniques, and we plan to broaden our clientele base through that kind of work you can’t get anywhere else.”

“Besides,” Kern added, “I’m having too much fun seeing exactly where we can take this business.”