MIAMI BEACH, FL — The revamped Fontainebleau hotel’s Vegas-style mega-club, named LIV after the year the resort opened (1954), is a focal point for its $1 billion makeover, and while the hotel’s overall budget was sizeable, the multipurpose fixtures make the most of the lighting investment, according to the lighting director who completed the project. Stephen Lieberman of SJ Lighting, who took over the lighting design midway into the project, was given free rein for LIV’s 30,000 square feet, which includes three full-service bars and six VIP skyboxes beneath a dome-shaped structure.
Lieberman’s directive: “Make it the coolest club ever,” he said. “We went ahead and basically started from scratch using the structure they had in there,” said Lieberman. “We put in an entirely new system that we thought was appropriate — and it came out great.”
The moving lights include 22 of Elation Professional’s Design Spot 575Es, which are used “virtually everywhere,” Lieberman said. These fixtures have capabilities that include CMY color mixing, gobo and animation wheels, and other effects, matching the multi-functionality of the club’s spaces.
“There are VIP booths on the balcony level, but in actuality, the whole club is pretty much like a VIP area,” Lieberman explained. “Even on the main floor there are banquettes and VIP tables. So this is a true multipurpose venue — any of these environments can be anything.”
Each Design Spot 575E fixture is versatile as well, with a variable frost filter for hard to soft-edged beams. They “fill the gap between wash and spot,” said Lieberman. “I figured let’s get the best of both worlds and not limit myself to a wash fixture for the majority of my lights.”
The Design Spot 575E’s other features and effects added to its value. “It’s a great fixture — with two rotating gobo wheels, an animation wheel, color mixing, an iris and a zoom. It’s got all the features of an $8,000 fixture at a much lower cost.”
To fill the club’s cubic footage with light, Lieberman took a layered approach. To provide detail around the balcony soffit, Lieberman added four smaller Elation moving heads, the 300-watt Design Spot 300E.
“It’s got almost the same features as the bigger light,” said Lieberman. “But since they were going to be in close proximity to the crowd, I didn’t want to put a 575-watt fixture in their face. The 300 gives a nice little layer of detail at about 10 feet off the floor, where everything else is high up in the ceiling.”
To light in the dome itself, Lieberman used another Elation fixture, the Impression RGB-color-mixing LED moving head. Eight Impressions provide circle detail around the center of the dome.
Although small in size — just 16 pounds and able to fit on a 14-inch center — the Impression’s color output is comparable to a 575W discharge fixture, and yet its 90 Luxeon K2 red, green and blue LEDs consume about half the energy.
According to Lieberman, the Impression lived up to its name. “I was definitely impressed,” he said. “The weight of the fixture is unbelievable; so are its bright color palettes, speed of movement and range of motion. All these things are major bonuses for the designer — and when you add in the energy-efficiency, there’s a tremendous bonus for the operator too, from a cost-benefit standpoint.”
Lieberman also tapped the benefits of LED technology to light the stage; in this case, with 25 Opti Tri Par LED par cans, which feature Elation’s TRI LED RGB-color-mixing technology. Each of the unit’s 18 LED diodes is comprised of RGB LEDs (RGB), allowing for smooth color mixing and the elimination of multi-color shadows, while still lightening LIV’s electrical load with
The Opti Tri Par’s 70W power draw has considerably lightened LIV’s electrical load. “The original designer had as many as 96 channels of dimming, and the electrician expressed concern to me about the total draw on the system,” said Lieberman. “So we knocked out all the dimming and replaced it with LED fixtures. We went from probably a 400-amp service to four 20-amp circuits.”
Elation’s DLED 60 LED strips, which are used as curtain lights, also limit power requirements. “I’ve got five of these strips lighting each of the two sets of curtains,” said Lieberman, “and each group of five is on one 20-amp circuit. And the power’s daisy-chained together. The electrician was ecstatic when I told him I need just one circuit and don’t worry about anything else.”
Since LIV opened, the club has hosted the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show after-party and welcomed celebrities including Paris Hilton, Beyonce, Jay Z, Pamela Anderson and P Diddy, among others. “Every day somebody calls me or sends me an email about how great this place is,” Lieberman said.
For more information, please visit www.sjlighting.com and www.elationlighting.com.
