Metropolis's Simon Harris and Andy Shelton thought laterally when designing the scheme. They asked their manufacturing division Met 3 to make some special moving versions of its TC12 LED spotlight, complete with 6° lenses. These are mounted within existing down-lighter fittings and fixed onto off-the-shelf pan/tilt motors that are DMX controlled via a custom driver. There are four of these new units, two per side flanking the door of the club. The fixtures provide a gentle sweep of movement over 100°.
The walls - running along two different streets - are washed with 25m of Metropolis TC linear LED strip fittings comprising 780 1W LEDs - emitting what Metropolis say would be the equivalent of about 10 kW of tungsten lighting. These are of various lengths and include 150mm unlensed strips over the windows and several 75mm pitch lensed fittings. It's unusual to use lensed fixtures in this way, but the original demo took place on a snowy night in February and the lensed ones looked much more vibrant, so the client chose them. The strips are attached to the underside of a small ledge between the top of the ground floor and the first floor. Being LED, there are huge cost saving and durability benefits. In addition to the four moving downlighters, there are 12 static RGB spotlights attached to the side of the building.
The installation was undertaken by Metropolis on behalf of Ian Frost from project management company WFC who handled the entire project. Once installed, the lighting was programmed on a LightProcessor QCommander console by Maria Jenkins and then stored on a QCommander Replay unit. The client has a small keypad behind the reception desk, through which they can access eight different scenes and sequences and on/off. The brief was that it should be very simple for them to run.
Shelton comments: "At face value this is a relatively straightforward project, but there were two challenges we had to overcome - a very tight budget for the amount of lighting required and the client's specific request for 'movement of colour'. We ruled out moving heads very quickly on the basis that although the units were relatively inexpensive, the weatherproof domes were going to cost far too much! Instead, we came up with the idea of mounting our TC12 spotlight fittings on off-the-shelf pan and tilt units and manufacturing a DMX controller to drive the motors. This innovative solution fitted the requirements perfectly. The client is extremely happy with the result - and so is Metropolis."
(Lee Baldock)
