The main contractor for the entertainment aspects of the venue was Stonex, one of Spain's leading specialists in the field. Given equal footing with construction company Ferrovial and architectural specialist Sigarci, Stonex completed the entire 3million contract in just four-and-a-half months, under the guidance of joint project managers Carlos Garcia-Diéguez and Javier Latorre.
Stonex's involvement included interior and exterior lighting, audio, electrical installation and stage engineering. The main building itself consists of the casino and a show theatre. The 400-capacity auditorium is just one of four multipurpose rooms with moveable walls; at full capacity, the space can seat up to 2,000 people, making it the largest such showroom in Spain.
Starting outside, the design of the architectural lighting - which uses over 2000 channels, or four universes, of DMX - was undertaken by French lighting designer Daniel Fayolle, with support from Stonex engineers. To achieve the result he was after, Fayolle chose fixtures almost exclusively from the product range of Italian manufacturer, Clay Paky.
Fayolle explained that he had opted for Clay Paky after a contest between several leading manufacturers, and in the end the choice was based on the combination of features, exterior capability and light output. Fayolle also praised the technical assistance from the Italian manufacturer.
Of the exterior design, he explains:"In the beginning, we wanted a projector like a Skytracker, but the Casino wanted something different, so I decided to use 10 Stage Zoom 1200s to make a new sky effect: we have no single big light, but a very mobile effect, with changing colours, visible from 10km around the valley."
Fayolle used 68 CP Color 575 colour-changing fixtures to cover the exterior walls of the building; these are fitted to customised stands and use special 'ovalizer' lenses. Then, 34 Stage Zoom 1200s are used, 24 at the first roof level, with the remaining 10 at the upper roof level. For these fixtures, Stonex created custom weather-proof covers from aluminium and glass, with fan-assisted cooling. Also used are 12 of the company's new Alpha Spot fixtures, with six positioned each side of the projection surface on the exterior of the building's 5m high tower. Finally, Fayolle opted for three Telescan Cameleon T6 projectors (6k HMIs) for the job of projecting 'picture frames' onto the walls. The exterior lightshow is driven by a Sunlite 2004 software package with four modules (4 x 512 channels).
For the interior of the Casino, LED technology is used for all dynamic lighting. The area immediately inside the entrance is animated with 90 Cove Mx fixtures from Color Kinetics, and further inside, the lobby features 20 Palco 3 LED floods from SGM and 16 Moduled 318s from French manufacturer, Ayrton. Other feature areas are highlighted with 17 iColor MRG2 and 176 Cove QL units from Color Kinetics. All these animations, says Fayolle, are also driven by Sunlite 2004 software with three modules (3 x 512 channels).
The Casino's show theatre boasts a number of impressive stats. It has probably the longest fire curtain in Spain, measuring 31m x 7.5m (designed and made by Stonex), as well as the longest reach Gala Spiralift system in the whole of Europe - again designed and installed by Stonex. It uses four ND18-36 Spiralifts to lift up to 40 tonnes from understage to stage level - a lift of just over 10m - at variable speeds of up to 9m per minute. Due to their huge weight capacity, each lift is powered by four motors to increase the safety of the braking system, say Stonex.
Stonex also designed and built the 18 motorised flybars, each 32m
