About Vitro Media Lab

Vitro never takes on a project alone. Behind the studio is a network of photographers, videographers, designers, musicians, print partners and production crews, built up over years of work in and around Lafayette. Each project gets the people it needs, and you keep one point of contact from the first email to delivery.

The studio works with bands, venues, promoters, schools, event crews and small businesses, and most of them are building something the studio believes in. Local businesses back Vitro in return, with referrals, equipment and good advice.

The network keeps growing. If you’re a photographer, videographer, designer, musician, venue or studio in the area, get in touch.

Vitro comes from the Latin in vitro, “in glass”: the way a lab grows something new under glass. Nearly everything the studio makes passes through glass on its way to you: a camera lens, a computer chip, a screen. Vitro Media Lab is where local culture gets grown the same way, one project at a time.

Elijah Davis is an Indiana native and a Purdue graduate who started out in corporate software engineering. He traded it for the small creative shops where the work gets made: a web studio, a print shop and a camera shop, each one teaching him how a good studio runs from the inside, with years of freelance work alongside. Vitro brings all of it under one roof.

He has always been drawn to things people keep. He collects vinyl and cassettes, shoots on film, and handles old tapes and prints with the care of someone who has a shelf of his own. Restoration grew out of years of retouching and design work, done in free and open-source tools.

He also makes experimental art, generative pen plots and glitch art, shown on his artist page, and on YouTube he repairs cameras and walks through free, open-source tools. Most of all, he likes being part of what Lafayette’s artists and businesses are building.

Lafayette has real talent: musicians, artists, photographers and people who know their craft. Too often it gets undercut, and too much of what local businesses spend leaves town for large companies that don’t answer the phone.

Vitro keeps that work and that money here. That means fair prices from a local studio, tools anyone can use for free (The Suite), and websites and files that belong to the people who paid for them, so a business isn’t losing its profit to another monthly subscription. The goal is a local business community that stands on its own, and a network that puts Lafayette on the map for the artists who work here.

It’s one circle. A design becomes a print. A shoot becomes a website, business cards and merch. An old tape or photo gets restored, then printed or put online. A band needs photos, a website and CDs to sell at shows. A family needs old tapes saved and faded photos restored and printed. A new shop needs a website, business cards and a menu.

Doing it in one place means one team that already knows your project, one point of contact, one set of files, and one email when something needs to change.

• One point of contact from the first email to delivery, with the right specialists brought in where a project needs them.
• Prices are written down before work starts. Print and digitizing prices are on the site.
• Every email gets a reply within 24 hours.
• Local work happens in person in Lafayette and West Lafayette. Websites, design, digitizing and printing work for clients anywhere.