Catering to a clientele that wants to see and be seen, Voyeur, an electronic music nightspot in San Diego's Gaslamp district, has been equipped with lipstick cameras placed throughout the venue, feeding imagery of patrons onto nearly two dozen plasma TVs. The renovation design for the former Ole Madrid was inspired by Radiohead's Thom Yorke, who "had all these lipstick cameras around him, and we're aiming for the same effect," said club co-owner Johnny Shockey. "It's kind of like spying – incorporating the whole voyeur concept."
There are a total of 22 plasma screens in the club, some as large as 50 inches. Seven of these TVs are positioned inside an LED wall located behind the DJ Performance area that measures 30 feet in width and is 11 feet high.
The LED wall is configured with cutouts made to accommodate the seven inset plasma screens, audio speakers and several lighting fixtures. The wall also wraps around two alcoves where dancers perform on raised platforms.
Creating an LED wall to encompass these openings and dimensions posed a challenge, according to Dave McKinnon of Felix Lighting (La Mirada, Calif.), which helped design and install Voyeur's lighting system.
"It was very much a jigsaw puzzle," said McKinnon. "The plasmas and other gear had to be inset first so that we could build the wall around these elements. The wall also had to be recessed and overlapped where the dancers' platforms are."
The product chosen to meet this challenge was the X-Panel, a 7.9-inch-by-7.9-inch square LED tile from Acclaim Lighting. Each X-Panel contains 25 SMD RGB LED pixels arranged in a five-by-five configuration.
The X-Panels, which are DMX compatible and controlled by Acclaim's X-Soft software, can be used for low-res displays that combine video, text and graphics. Compatible file formats include JPEG, FLASH, BMP, WMV, MPG, AVI and MOV.
In all, 561 X-Panel tiles were used to build the LED wall at Voyeur. "We liked the fact that the X-Panel was small, was square, and is modular. This made it easy to install and easy to service" said McKinnon. "Other products were not square and did not allow us to fit in the required openings. The X-Panel gave us the flexibility that we needed."
Felix Lighting also used a product from Acclaim's sister company Elation Professional – Flex LED Tape RGB – to create a "glowing" effect throughout Voyeur. A thin LED circuit strip housed inside a silicone sleeve, Flex Tape comes in 10-foot spools of 60 2-inch-long strips, each containing three SMD LEDs (red, green and blue), which can be cut and re-soldered together to create the desired length.
At Voyeur, Felix Lighting used 250 feet of Flex Tape as an RGB color-changing border that highlights everything from the main bar's front edge and shelves to the club's stairs and restroom surfaces. The tape is run off DMX drivers, which provide 3 channels and lets it be used with any DMX-512 controller.
"The Flex Tape was perfect, because it has a thin profile and a protective cover and it's very flexible," said McKinnon. "We used it to make everything in the club glow."
Not everything at Voyeur incorporates new technology, however. On Voyeur's Stage 2, Felix Lighting uses 280 dimmable and individually channeled cabaret-style lamps that chase on an uploaded replay unit (AR32) to give an "old school" peep-show vibe to the burlesque-styled stage.
