Maxim Oscar Party
Lighting Designer Rachel Miller explains her work on the Maxim Oscar Party for The Visionary Group.
This event took place at a beautiful mansion in the hills above the exclusive Sunset Plaza neighborhood. As guests walked up the driveway they passed a Ford Car Customization Wall where Ford, the title sponsor, had three custom Mustangs on display. We projected a photo-realistic glass gobo of their Mustang logo which floated above the customized cars. Simple clean deep amber light cascaded up the house exterior from Chauvet COLORado TriTour LED Pars.
The backyard gave me a nice clean slate to work with. I chose a punchy amber gobo texturing the deck. This popped against a saturated bluish-purple LED wash glistening over the pool. It gave the yard some nice saturated contrast. To give the area a little more vertical pizazz, I added COLORado’s with wide-flood lenses uplighting the canopy of each palm trees around the yard.
I only had eight feet from floor to ceiling to light an A-list performer
As guests made their way back into the house they passed by the Ford Activation Lounge. I wanted to maintain the sleek integrity of the space and also allow the displays, which were iPads mounted to race-car seats, really pop. I opted for a less-is-more concept choosing to simply uplight the scenic panels with ColorBlast TR2s and let the glow from the iPads illuminate the rest of the space. It was just the right amount of light without any unnecessary clutter.
The Club Lounge upstairs is where the true craziness ensued! I only had eight feet from floor to ceiling to light an A-list performer, with what was anticipated to be a packed room. I knew I couldn’t get ideal angles to light the stage considering how many people would be in the room that night.
With the extremely low ceiling height I’d only have a two feet to shoot any light above their heads. So again, following the Less-Is-More principal, I created a pattern of color-changing LED tubes on the back wall of the stage. It not only offered a cool visual backdrop, but they gave me a much needed backlight glow to the stage. I then mounted COLORado’s on side pipes to achieve a steep side/front light. I squeezed in a few Martin MAC250s for the dance floor, but they became increasingly futile for that purpose. As guests packed the room, the Mac 250s ended up doing dramatic sweeps of the room above the crowd.
Lastly, I used Phillips ColorKinetics ColorBlaze 72 LED striplights to uplight the perimeter walls of the room giving a deep saturated glow to the room with minimal floorspace, which was certainly at a premium! I definitely achieved the “nightclub” feel our client was going for, and at 4:30 am with the party still going strong it seemed the guests thought so as well.
