Swisspor is a leading manufacturer of insulation and sealing technologies for the building and construction industry. The high profile event included two evenings of a gala dinner followed by live entertainment, each attended by up to 1000 people drawn from a selection of Swisspor's clients, staff and management, business contacts, local politicians and others. A stage was erected in one of the factory's new Production Halls and each evening's show culminated in a performance by the popular Pepe Lienhard Orchestra.
Kern was responsible for the lighting and media design, operation and programming for the event. He was brought in by Zurich based Trendix Event Management who produced the event.
At the back and to the sides of the stage were three scenic elements constructed from different Styrofoam shapes, which lent themselves to lighting and projections. Kern used two of the DigitalSpots 7000DTs positioned each side of the stage to throw projections onto the two 15m Styrofoam wings flanking the stage. The Styrofoam elements forming these two wings resembled giant asymmetric kaleidoscopic patterns, a bit like cell structures.
Fitted with standard objective lenses, the DigitalSpot 7000DTs were rigged on a truss 14.5m away, each pair with their images horizontally soft-edged together to cover the full size of the wings. Kern then built and applied software masks to layer 1 of the fixtures so all the content was fitted exactly to the front sides only of the Styrofoam strands. The walls behind were lit with generic floor lights. Combined with the precisely projected images, this produced a dynamic 3D effect.
He used a mix of content pulled from the DigitalSpot's onboard library plus some of his own that was specially created for the show. The DigitalSpots were run via ArtNet, and Kern controlled these and all the lighting fixtures from a Compulite Vector Blue console.
(Jim Evans)
