Chris Pegg of Westbury National Show Systems, who served as the show's lighting designer, specified the system. "I'd seen the tiles in London last year and I thought they were the coolest thing in the universe," he says. "The creative director was looking for somethingthat had a mirror-bally type of feel-but that was updated and maybe a little modernized. The design already had a video element, but since the tiles are where lighting meets video, it really all fit together. The tiles have that sort of sparkle-aesthetically, it made the grade as ourown new style of mirror ball."
The show used 17sq.m of Versa Tile in three sections that were set up in a symmetrical design across the back wall of the fashion show behind the runway. Also, on the sides of the runway along the back, there were 8sq.m on each side of the stage. The tiles were 2m high and 4m wide on each side. For the tiles' content, Pegg chose plenty of bright, moving images that would match up with the club atmosphere in terms of the clothing, music and feel of the show, with symmetrical content that started in the middle and spread out towards the outer parts of the stage.
"One of the reasons I really wanted to use them was because you have a lot of white light in a fashion show," Pegg explains. "It's unavoidable. So you need something that can kick through that a bit and the tiles are pretty bright-they actually read a lot of the time even when there was quite a bit of light on the stage. They provided a really nice background for the cameras to shoot."
Even turned off, the Versa TILEs struck the perfect pose. "Because this was a fairly clean, modern-looking set, even when they weren't turned on they just fit totally naturally into the set," Pegg says. "But then when you turned it on, you'd go, ''Wow!' - All of a sudden, the set started looking naked without it. It fits together so seamlessly-you can disguise nicely."
Pegg and his crew used Element Labs' VersatilityT media management software to facilitate the cues. "It was dead easy to use, and it did exactly what I needed it to do, which was put in fade times and sort my media," Pegg says. "It was incredibly quick. The simplicity of it isalmost stunning - very easy to change and manipulate through the DMX interface. Being able to trigger it off of the lighting console [an Avolites Pearl 2000] made quite a bit of difference. We just wrote a device for it like a little fixture personality and away we went."
(Lee Baldock)
