Immersive Lighting and Video at NYC’s VIP Club
Sometimes you have a grand design concept swirling around in your head but just can’t quite express it to your clients in the way you would like. But then you get the chance to gradually unfurl and execute your vision over time despite their initial trepidation, and once it’s fully rolled out and realized, they fall in love with it. They’re elated, and you’re stoked.
Michael Meacham knows that feeling and that journey well. The owner and lead designer of idesign, he recently spent a year transforming the 3,500-square foot former NYC club Kiss and Fly into the lavish new VIP Room, a cousin to the French nightclub of the same name. His years of experience on a wide variety of jobs played well into this scenario. “We design many different kinds of spaces and venues all over the world,” he says. “We have done everything from lighting up the Veterans Hospital building in Miami and a shopping mall atrium in Washington DC [Chevy Chase Pavilion] to children’s hospitals, nightclubs, restaurants and resorts. Anything that needs some interesting lighting.”
The Right Vibe
The VIP Room in New York’s Meatpacking District combines an LED wall, overhead lights and LED strips stretching along the ceiling and down the posts to create a moody feeling that is highly appropriate for its urban locale. That approach evidently threw off Meacham’s clients at the beginning. “We got into that cultural clash where, at the VIP Room at their other locations in France and St. Tropez, they tend to like things very bright, using a lot of pinks and yellow,” he reports. “We thought it was way too bright for New York. When you see photos of any of the other locations, it’s fully lit — but you can’t do that in New York, it just doesn’t work well. We wanted to have higher contrast in there. You have areas of darkness plus areas where there’s just enough light.”
Meacham’s biggest challenge was getting across the overall concept to the club’s owners and making them feel comfortable with the design and product. He says they were insecure and jaded about the lighting process, having had a bad experience with a previous lighting company. “It was challenging, explaining the concepts and design, even with the detailed drawings,” admits Meacham. “We understand the design intents, as designers and programmers, because this is what we do for a living. We see it in our mind’s eye. We have a clear vision of what this is going to look like when completed. After several conversations, they eventually agreed to let us move forward with the entire design. When the LED wall and the side wall LED strips were installed, the owners were all very, very pleased. They said it was the best lighting that they had ever seen. We were thrilled that we could make that vision come to life.”
Visual Immersion
The goal for Meacham and idesign was to give this smaller room the feeling of a big nightclub by utilizing all of the technological tools that they had available, and he stresses that “the architects did a fantastic job at maximizing the space.” In terms of the design, “there is lighting coming from everywhere without being overkill. The overall effect creates a kind of immersion of lighting and video.”
Inside the VIP Room, a 10mm screen located behind the DJ booth expands along a good section of the wall, along with “custom LED bars that we call iStrip, a 1.5 mm LED bar with 13mm pixels inside of it. We can create curved shapes and designs, and we designed it to bring the video out from the center 10 mm screen to all the surrounding walls. For its endless creative possibilities, this has made it my favorite LED fixture.”
LED Light Sources
There are 35 overhead moving lights installed in the club. “We sourced the LED RGBW wash lights called the id107 from China,” says Meacham. “They are the main workhorses of the rig. On the sides, we have eight Chauvet [Intimidator Spot LED 350 fixtures]. I was skeptical at first, but we have had great results at other venues. It’s a perfect mid throw compact fixture.” Also on the sides are eight ADJ Freq 5 strobes. Meacham made sure every lighting source came from LEDs — bar lights, overhead lights, dance floor spots, strobes, UV dancer lights — and did not use a single discharge fixture, adding that this choice “keeps the cost down when it comes to operation and general maintenance.”
The designer says that they installed LED strips that come down from the ceiling at the intersects with the column “for that Z movement,” which, he feels, is a nice detail that adds another dimension to the room. That concept, Meacham notes, arose through the “great symbiotic relationship” with the project architect, Naphtali Deutsch. “There was no ego. It was only based on a team effort, which was really refreshing.”
Many NYC nightclubs can overdo the lights and sound, but Meacham does not think the VIP Room is over-stimulating in the way that they are using the system. He believes it’s appropriate for the space and how all of the elements work together.
“We’ve been told by many people who’ve seen the space and by the owners that there’s nothing like this in New York, which is a compliment in the highest order,” he says. “The club design is almost in the round. It’s more oval-shaped, and we wanted to take advantage of that in design. No matter where you are in there, you’re involved in the technology, video and lighting. It’s not like you’re sitting in the back of the house and looking at all the action. The action is really surrounding you.”
The Control Setup
Meacham adds that Seif Salem, with whom he used to work in Miami, “is now the technical director of the club and is doing a remarkable job bringing the show to its full potential.” Salem runs a grandMA2 with a playback wing and a touch screen, but Meacham wanted to go beyond that standard setup. “We set up the controls to have a grandMA communicating via Art-Net into Madrix, which maps out all the video,” explains Meacham. “The light operator can access unified video and lighting cues quickly in the MA. I added three big touch screens all on adjustable arms and a KVM switch to change the screens from MA or Madrix. We also included a Behringer audio distribution to input audio into both the MA and Madrix. Another added benefit is that with his own in-ear protective hearing, Seif gets a good clean audio feed coming out of the mix.”
Meacham says that he enjoys designing and programming nightclubs because it is a great way to express creativity, although he feels now that such creativity is being seen throughout public spaces. “The Internet and technology has opened up people to being over-stimulated, and designers are trying to push the boundaries even further everywhere. We collaborate with an inventive company called 3form. They fabricate really amazing high-end acrylics and resin — like bamboo woven inside of polycarbonate, jewels in glass and frosted colored resin, to name only a few types of material — and we are fortunate to highlight their materials with our lighting systems. Anytime that RGB gets involved, they ask us to design, program and install the custom lighting system.”
When asked if there was something new that he learned working on this project, Meacham replies that the experience was about seeing how far he could take his creativity without breaking his budget and “working with talented professionals like the architects and having our genius project manager, Holmes Ives, onsite, helping to figure things out. There was plenty of design build on this project. Holmes is remarkable at being able to take what the architects and I designed, then building, installing and making it program ready. We love doing what we do and are grateful to work with such a talented crew. The greatest reward is seeing a project like this come to life and having very happy
clients.”
Gear
1 MA Lighting grandMA2 console w/wing
35 RGBW id107 Wash fixtures
8 Chauvet Professional Intimidator Spot LED 350 fixtures
8 ADJ Freq 5 LED strobes
360 1.5mm Video iStrips
12 LED panels (10mm, 1×1 meter each)
150 1.5 meter digital low resolution bars (for ceiling/columns)
1 Enttech Art-Net playback fader wing
4 Enttech Datagate MK2 DMX/RDM splitters
1 LVP 605 video processer
1 Pro Madrix Key
2 Super Logic’s Rackmount Servers
1 Swisson 5/2 Optical Splitter
