Posts tagged ground floor

The 3D Storytelling conference is over for another year and has once again been an enjoyable yet stressful experience. This years conference I (Tom) was in charge of the event’s lighting, which entailed transforming buildings bland look and creating a cinema / main lecture space, which is subtitle for 3D screenings as well as live broadcasted keynotes.

The event itself was on the 22nd and 23rd of march and consisted of a few main spaces. These main spaces were the Primary Lecture Space, this also doubled as a realD Cinema, an Exhibition Space on Level 4, a Secondary Lecture room in 212/213 and a 3D Games room in 209/10.

Way-finding for the event was assisted by colour coding the individual floors, with the same or similar colours being used on the banners and event guides. This involved gel’ing nearly 300 separate lamps ranging from standard florescent tubes to small circle spots, this itself took nearly 2 day’s on and off between 4 people. But the effect achieved, certainly enhanced the buildings character as well as completed the objective to make way-finding as easy as possible.

Along with colour coding each floor I decided to stick with the theme of colour and light the Ground Floor and Level 4 atrium walls, this was achieved with some success, through the use of 4 Studio Due, City Colours per floor. During the day these were fairly effective at colouring the walls with certain colours working a lot better than others, mainly due to the sun and the great big white tent across the road, called The O2, both helping to wash out the efforts of the City Colours. The ground floor atrium’s city colours were also used during the after event networking and this is where they really performed and brought the building to life.

I also used two Clay Paky Alpha Spot 1200HPE’s per floor to provide a break up to the solid wall of colour. This could have been very effective with a little bit more programming and timing between all fixtures. The lack of time partially came from the 1/2 day it took to get the Clay Paky’s up and running, due to a simple fault/menu which prohibited the lamp from fully striking, once this was solved they individually outperformed 2 or more of the City Colours, and were very easy fixtures to use and program.

The Alpha Spots and City Colours, were two new fixtures for me and this event was the first time I had used either of them. We had some initial trouble positioning the City colours due to there planned location (Level 4 Balcony) being designated a fire lane and a new location being sought rapidly to cover the same wall. The new compromised location’s were on Level 1 and Mezz in 3 spread out locations. This caused a few focus issues, but the final results was better than originally planned with the new positions uplighting the wall, creating a far better look from the ground floor, which originally would have been quite shadowy with all the deep circle windows.

The Walker Space, which was the main Lecture space and realD Cinema, used a completely generic rig consisting of pars, pups, and source 4’s. The main goal was to provide a dark theatre like space that kept in theme with the ground floor of the building. The walls were washed pink and originally had a slightly darker pink break-up on top. Due to complaints of inadequate light from the hospitality team the breakups were refocused from the walls onto the seating and the gel was removed, this provided some speckled white light in the room between lectures.

Overall I’m fairly happy with the outcome of this project however there is a lot I would change such as:

• More audience lighting in the Walker Space
• 1k’s or Strand Coda Floods for the wall wash
• Checking Gel’s before purchase, from swatch and not relying on the Lee Filter’s Website
• Possibly Top Hat’s on the Source 4’s to stop glare for the presenters
• Black Wrap or Source 4’s as backlight to remove the spill onto the realD screen
• Lighting columns or spot locations by day and whole walls by night
• Having more time to program and adjust programming