London, UK based creative lighting and event design practice Renegade designed all the technical production and co-ordinated equipment supply – including lighting, video and visuals, set and scenic elements plus sound – for the high profile SHINE 2011 Benefit Dinner.
This was staged at Old Billingsgate Market, one of London's premium event venues. The evening featured a gala dinner for 500 guests, complete with charity auction, rounded off by an amazing performance by 1970's African/American disco/rhythm/R&B superstars Chic – headed by guitarist Nile Rogers (also a highly acclaimed music producer). They romped through their greatest hits including ‘Le Freak', ‘Good Times' and other anthems with great panache!
The event raised money for the charity, which supports additional educational initiatives encouraging children and young people to raise their achievement levels.
Renegade has worked closely with SHINE for the last 8 years, producing all their live events. Each year for this special event, Renegade's Nick Gray comes up with a fresh and inventive visual theme for the evening.
The 2011 SHINE Benefit Dinner was project managed for Renegade by Mike Fidler working with Nick Gray and Andy Cobb from Sculptivate who collaborated with Gray on the overall concept and co-ordinated the set and stage build.
The venue was divided into a two room format. Gray's lighting design for the dinner section on the west side, created a cozy and intimate feel within the proto industrial chic of the space. Renegade brought in drapes specialists Blackout to clad the walls, but leaving the impressive arches running down the sides of the room exposed and ripe for architectural highlighting.
To ensure the dinner setting had a real vibe and atmosphere, Gray suspended five pre-wired vintage lightbulbs – of varying large sizes and wattages – over each table, all with striking filaments, distinctive copper fabric cables and individual control. This brought a really magical illuminative touch to the room.
A 6mm high resolution LED wall was built in the middle of the dining room to show constantly updated results of the progress of the auction.
Six trusses were installed above the dining room, rigged with VARI*LITE V*L2500 Wash and Martin Professional MAC 700 Profile moving lights, which were used to skim the walls, floor and tables. The room columns and arches were up-lit with battery powered wireless LED units.
The band stage room (on the east side) also doubled as the reception for when guests arrived – transformed from one to the other by the production team in lightening quick time as guests enjoyed their dinner.
Integral to Gray's design were eight panels of white gauze hung above the stage, used for projection surfaces, fed with custom-created 1970's disco-tasic visuals and animation material for the band – which went down a storm! The projections were fed – via a Catalyst media server – to two 20K machines positioned on balcony level, supplied by XL Video.
A series of staggered drop bars from the trusses flown above the stage were positioned between the scrims, populated with 12 Martin MAC Auras, six Atomic strobes and 12 x 2-lite Moles attached to their ends, giving the stage a quirky look. Above, on the trusses themselves were V*L 2500 Spots and Clay Paky Alpha Wash 700 moving lights.
An audience truss was rigged down the length of the room, and hung with Martin MAC 2Ks and Clay Paky Halo fixtures above the dancefloor area.
The two long corner bars in the room each had a line of vintage bulbs hung above, on barrels suspended below the trussing,and the room pillars were again picked out by LED up-lighters which were supplied by Shok London.
All the stage lighting was supplied by White Light and .operated by Trent O'Connor using a grandMA light and a Chamsys MagicQ consoles. Renegade crew chief Chris Fyfe co-ordinated the 7 lighting crew over two days of get in and rehearsals.
Audio was supplied by Andrew Frengley of Matrix 9, and Blackout also supplied and did all the rigging.
The challenges, relates Gray, were making the space warm and comfortable for the dinner – in a supper club style – and also the tight get in schedule as all the production was brought in specifically for the occasion. He comments, “It was a real pleasure to work on this event again. We had a great team that worked fabulously together on all the creative and production elements, with SHINE putting a lot of trust in us to deliver a top class memorable event that was a hugely successful fundraiser”.
For more press information on Renegade, please call Louise Stickland on +44 7831 329888 or +44 1865 202679 or EMail : [email protected]. To contact Renegade direct, please call Nick Gray on +44 7795 095427 or check www.renegadedesign.co.uk.
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