Produced by Aslize and designed by Scenographism, the projection show featured two Christie 25K projectors and E//T//C France's OnlyView control system.
The event marked the end of a year of celebrations for Van Cleef & Arpels' centenary, which started when they moved into the Place Vendume salon in 1906. The interiors have now been completely redesigned by Patrick Jouin.
The opening was a select, invitation-only red carpet event for Van Cleef & Arpels' 500 best clients. The exclusivity of the occasion demanded some very special presentation, so Van Cleef & Arpels turned to innovative event producers Aslize to conceive and design a 'magical' video projection show. "Projection was the obvious solution," says Aslize's technical director Dan Fernandez. "It looks stunning and has a massive impact."
Image designer Fabien Martineau has completed many high profile projects with E//T//C France and often uses the medium of video and large format film projection in his work. "They are the only company I would consider using," he explains. "They have the best equipment, a massive amount of expertise, and the flexibility of OnlyView saves much time and stress in programming and the final realisation."
Martineau created an animated show storyboard to meet Van Cleef & Arpels' tough aesthetic brief, which also had to be related to the re-launch and what was happening inside the showroom "The nature of the project was very specific," says Martineau. "They wanted very subtle, elegant, understated and beautiful projections with lots of detail." Any colours used also had to be restrained and in keeping with this theme. They chose the two Christie 25s to cover the 30m by 10m high surface area with 16:9 aspect ratio images.
Martineau spent a month compiling source material for the three-minute looped show - a combination of digital photos of jewels, drawings and conceptual sketches taken from Van Cleef's theme and Jouin's designs. The finalised programme files were stored on four OnlyView computers - one for each projector, a master, and one for running the 5.1 audio soundtrack.
Onsite, the projectors were positioned 25m away in two specially constructed, discreet hides, designed by Aslize. All the necessary perspective and keystone correction was done onsite using OnlyView software. All the masking to fit the images to the building was also completed in OnlyView by programmer Nicolas Manichon.
The resulting footage saw the front of the building come alive with fairies whizzing in and out of the columns, working their magic; roses and garlands 'growing', snow flakes flying, butterflies fluttering and stars twinkling.
E//T//C France's crew of five comprised Nicolas Manichon, Robin Darraux, Yannick Kohn, Patrick Lefevre, Patrick Matuszek. The event's production manager was Marie-Elise Chocroun and the stage managers were Adolphe Peres and Vincent Renault.
(Jim Evans)
