Founded by YouTube stars and married couple Chad Wild Clay and Vy Qwaint, Spy Ninjas HQ is a huge indoor adventure park located in Las Vegas, NV. Featuring a zip line, aerial ropes course, climbing wall, trampolines, axe throwing, escape rooms, virtual reality and much more, it allows fans to enter the world of Chad and Vy’s popular YouTube series, Spy Ninjas. Integral to creating this immersive environment is lighting, with over 150 ADJ fixtures of various models deployed across the facility. From washes to moving heads, strobes to effect projectors, the lighting is utilized to give each activity its own identity while also injecting energy and excitement into the space, significantly enhancing the visitor experience.
With over 40 million subscribers across their various YouTube channels, Chad Wild Clay and Vy Qwaint are more than just influencers. Having cultivated a global fan base, expanded into merchandise and book publishing, the couple have now become the first YouTubers to open their own adventure park. Offering over 100 skill-based activities, Spy Ninjas HQ invites fans to participate in the action for themselves, engaging in fun-filled games, as well as the mystery-solving and martial arts action that make the Spy Ninjas videos so popular. It even features a unique rage room where visitors can use a variety of ninja weapons to smash (out of date) fruit (the remains of which go to a local farm to feed their animals). This pays homage to Chad and Vy’s early YouTube videos where they gained notoriety for ninja chopping fruit in slow motion.
Two years of planning went into the creation ofSpy Ninjas HQ. The creative ideas and inspiration came from Chad and Vy, however, to bring their vision to reality, they partnered with veteran of the family entertainment industry, Bryan Severance. Having been introduced by another vendor, Bryan originally came on board as a consultant for the project. As plans for the park progressed, he became excited by its potential to become something truly special and proposed coming on board as a partner in the business. This allowed Bryan to invest more time in developing the technical implementation of the park, creating a level of production above and beyond what can be found in any other similar attraction.
Founded in 1996, Bryan’s company Fallout Zones LLC specializes in designing, installing and operating family fun centers. The company has consulted on, designed, and supplied hundreds of laser tag arenas, trampoline parks, and other indoor entertainment venues across the USA. It is a well-established ADJ dealer, regularly supplying ADJ fixtures to enhance the atmosphere of the venues it creates. However, for Spy Ninjas HQ the amount of lighting fixtures installed and the way they were integrated into the theming and operation of the park went beyond anything the company has previously supplied.
“For some family fun centers, lighting can be an afterthought,” explains Bryan. “It’s simply a case of throwing up a load of ‘flash and trash’ fixtures at the last moment, but we design our lighting strategically to deliver maximum impact for our customers. We took this concept even further for Spy Ninjas HQ, where we consider the lighting to be an attraction in its own right. We know the ‘amaze effect’ when people walk in and are taken aback by how cool the place looks is an essential element of our success. The lighting makes the whole experience more immersive; it makes customers want to come back and also share photos and video online, which is essentially free marketing for the park!”
Following a soft launch in February, Spy Ninjas HQ celebrated its grand opening for Chad’s birthday on March 10. Huge crowds attended the event, which broke the record set by Mr Beast’s Beast Burger launch for opening day gross revenue, and the venue has remained consistently busy for the five months since its launch. Housed in a 43,000 sq. ft. building, the park offers 53,000 sq. ft of playable space, thanks to a multi-level layout, as well as a café and separate retro-themed bar. Unusually for an indoor fun center, the walls and ceiling of the main space are painted white. This was a deliberate design decision to allow the color of the whole venue to be changed using lighting fixtures. ADJ’s potent 32 HEX Panel IP LED wash fixtures are installed in the ceiling to provide a vibrant wash across the entire expanse. “It was the only fixture we could find that would wash the ceiling in the way that we wanted,” states Bryan. “It gives a good even coverage without huge hot spots and has a nice beam angle, which can be softened using the supplied frost filter. It is also incredibly bright; despite all the other lights in the park, it really cuts through and gives a rich glow to the whole ceiling.”
To spotlight individual attraction elements and décor features throughout the park in vibrant colors, Bryan selected ADJ’s popular Mega Hex Par LED par fixture. “It delivers great color mixing and really high output with a low power consumption,” enthuses Bryan, “which was another important consideration for all the fixtures we installed, as we only had a limited supply to the building that had to cover all of the lighting, audio, video and attraction equipment.”
Color is used throughout the park to differentiate between the various areas and attractions, however even the fixtures which are usually used for static color washing are connected via DMX to the building-wide control system. This utilizes over 500 DMX universes and allows programmed cues to be triggered to change the whole look of the park for themed moments. For example, ‘The Hackers’ – Chad and Vy’s enemies from the Spy Ninjas serial – may ‘take over the building’, which involves all the wash lighting turning green, accentuated by white flashes from Jolt 300 LED strobe fixtures strategically placed around the venue. “Chad and Vy also film in the park quite a bit,” adds Bryan, “so we designed the lighting such that we can go into the control room, press a button, and all the lighting switches to a dedicated filming scene. This sets all the washes to white with a color temperature of 5600K, which makes capturing great quality video footage very easy for the guys.”
In the park’s trampoline area, ADJ’s LED-powered Focus Spot 4Z moving head spot fixtures are used to add energy and excitement. Programmed to project moving and color-changing GOBOs onto the walls and ceiling as well as the trampolines themselves, their sharp beams cut through the background wash lighting to create bright and crisp patterns. “The Focus Spot 4Zs are really robust, bright and versatile fixtures,” says Bryan. “They do a great job of adding energy to that area and they’ve been running nonstop all day, every day since March, so are already proving reliable.”
This section of the park is also covered by ADJ’s UV COB Cannon fixtures, which bathe the trampolines in UV light and cause white and UV-active décor and clothing to glow brightly. “I love the UV COB Cannon,” comments Bryan. “I’ve probably bought 80 in the last few years for various projects. Back in the day, we would need to use 3-4 T8 tubes to generate the same coverage. Now we can cover the same area, with more output, using just one UV COB Cannon – which is a huge saving in terms of installation and electrics. We also have the added versatility of DMX control and dimming, so we can get a nice uniform coverage even when some fixtures have to be positioned further back and others close up.”
One of the park’s signature features is ‘Ninja Tag’, a five-level, adult-sized, obstacle course. As well as colored spotlighting from Mega Hex Pars and additional wash lighting provided by Ultra Hex Bar 6 linear LED wash fixtures, this area features a variety of effect fixtures. These include Starburst rotating LED spheres, Sweeper Beam Quad LED tilting LED bars and multifunctional Stinger II moonflower, laser and UV fixtures. “Stinger II, love those things!,” enthuses Bryan. “I think I’ve bought more of those than any light other than the Hex Par. If I’m doing a trampoline park on a tight budget, I’ll throw four or six of those up and they’ll do a really great job all on their own. If you’re looking for maximum excitement from one single fixture, I’d buy those all day long. They’re fantastic; I freaking love ‘em!”
GOBO projections are also utilized in this area, programmed to move around the walkways, generated by ADJ’s Focus Spot 2X as well as the new Stealth Spot from sister company Eliminator Lighting. A number of Eliminator’s compact yet potent Vortex barrel mirror scanners have also been installed within sections of the course. “The Vortex is very simple, but very effective,” states Bryan. “It’s compact but throws out a great coverage of cool moving beams that will fill a whole area with colored GOBO patterns, bringing lots of energy and interest. It really enhances the adrenaline rush and creates a ‘need for speed’, when you’ve got those things spinning around it almost tricks your mind into thinking that you’re moving faster than you really are… or compels you to want to move faster. It definitely adds to that element of speed needed for this attraction.”
Offering a wide variety of unique experiences, immersive theming and huge attention to detail, Spy Ninjas HQ truly raises the bar for indoor adventure parks. The ADJ lighting fixtures installed throughout the building contribute significantly to the visitor experience as well as the impressive aesthetics of the space, which is essential for an attraction which relies heavily on social media for its marketing. While the ADJ fixtures were selected by Bryan based on their ability to produce the desired effects, another significant consideration was their reliability.
“We find there’s a lot of life in ADJ’s fixtures, now more than ever,” concludes Bryan. “When we’re installing these fun centers, our clients want equipment they can rely on for years to come and are also often looking for ease of use – so good internal programs – as well as good value for money, and ADJ delivers on all fronts. Spy Ninjas HQ is a little different, we wanted to take the lighting to the next level, so it’s all DMX controlled and ADJ fixtures have worked just as well for this more involved project. The result is truly impressive, you won’t find all these features and this level of lighting and production anywhere else!”
Here’s a video on this project from Chad Wild Clay:
