Elation lights pop-up venue Club Nomadic
- Details
Elation Professional stage and decorative lighting was used to dress the club in colour and effect for a series of pre-Super Bowl events with Elation’s new IP65-rated Proteus moving heads used outside to beckon visitors to the venue.
Construction of the 62,500sq.ft pop-up venue began on 28 November, 2016 with the live event space opening its doors on 2 February for a series of events that included VIP performances by Bruno Mars, The Chainsmokers, Snoop Dog, Sam Hunt and Taylor Swift.
For those looking to have a good time in the city ahead of the big game, the temporary venue offered all the amenities you would expect from a top install like world-class lighting and sound and a professional performance stage, not to mention tiered mezzanines where many of the 9,000 music and football fans could oversee the excitement.
The overall creative and architectural design for the event was led by Nomadic Entertainment’s Joanna Helinurm with executive production by Jack Murphy, who also serves as president of Nomadic Entertainment Group. Industry veteran Patrick Dierson of production and design firm The Activity served as production designer.
The first event of the week was for co-sponsorship partner EA Sports for their inaugural EA Sports Bowl which was followed each night of Super Bowl weekend by other co-sponsorship events, namely Pepsi’s Life Water Art After Dark and DirecTV’s Super Saturday Night events. The Chainsmokers, Sam Hunt, Snoop dog and Bruno Mars played shows the first two nights with Taylor Swift closing the venue down on 4 February.
Production designer Dierson says that the Pepsi design team had approached The Activity with the request of wanting a “Hollywood searchlight effect” for the event, something Dierson already had on his radar. “What we had been struggling with at the time was the choice of unit that would be appropriate for the task,” he says.
“We had remembered being extremely impressed with seeing the Proteus units at LDI several months earlier and had begun the process of enquiring whether or not the production models would be available in time for this project; our main edict being that we were truly in need of an IP65 rated fixture that could handle the inevitable downpours that were to be expected in Houston during our event’s timeframe. Thankfully, Elation came to our rescue with the Proteus Beams.”
Baz Halpin of Silent House designed an extremely versatile lighting rig that was utilized across all three nights with various floor lighting and video packages augmenting each of the artists.
Elation Colour Chorus 12 LED battens, Level Q7 LED Par lights, Volt Q5 rechargeable LED uplights and Platinum FLX hybrid moving heads were dispersed around the club to give colour to the entire venue. Elation ZCL 360 Bar LED moving batten effects with 360° continuous rotation were used on stage to light all of the shows except for Taylor Swift.
The stage featured a large video wall and Klunder used the ZCL 360 Bars as the main stage light on The Chainsmokers, the first act to play, to break up the video. “We used two lines of ZCL 360 Bars on stage for The Chainsmokers to give depth to the look,” he explained. “The other artists liked the look so well that they decided to use it on their shows as well.”
The most unusual aspect of the production, Dierson says, was the venue itself. “This was truly a temporary mobile venue that was full-blown construction.” Nomadic Entertainment’s Michael Lamprides oversaw the general contracting of the build and handled everything from the excavation of the site all the way through TPA permitting with the host city. The Activity worked closely with Michael during the various construction phases to give input from the viewpoint of entertainment production.”
(Jim Evans)
