TORONTO — In today’s troubled economy every client group is looking to hold down costs — and no one more than the Big Three auto manufacturers. When Christie Lites (Toronto) began working on plans for lighting the General Motors booth at the 2009 Canadian International Auto Show (CIAS), keeping the budget lean but replicating the successful design elements in years past was a tough order to fill. Located in the show’s main exhibition hall at the Metro Toronto Convention Center, the GM booth covered a sprawling 84,600 square feet. On display were 104 cars and trucks from all of the company’s brands — a myriad of offerings including Saturn, Saab and Hummer.
The original plot called for more than 500 fixtures to light the exhibit, but the budget demands spoke to a more limited scope. Still, the overall visual integrity needed to be respected, with a solid balance between base light levels and visual punch for the featured products.
“Our inventory runs at a very high level in late winter due to the significant demands of the North American auto show circuit,” said Rob Charnetski of Christie Lites. The Christie organization provides lighting for the Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, Montreal, DC, Toronto and New York shows from its 9 various branch locations across North America.
When looking for the right mix of fixtures, budget was definitely a big consideration, said Charnetski, but other features were also high on the list to meet the unique challenges of an auto show environment. For the Toronto GM project, these features also included having a remotely focusable daylight color temperature unit.
“On most large auto booths, it really helps if you have remotely focusable lights, not only because the cars are always being moved as the booth is fine tuned, but also due to labor and access issues,” said Charnetski. “This is especially true during the media preview, when they may typically move as many as one-third of the cars up on stage, then move them back again when the show starts.”
Exhibiting cars under daylight color temperature white is a trend that has been growing among auto manufacturers for the past several years, said Charnetski. “Of course, everything used to be limited to the standard tungsten sources, but for many years there has been more universal use of 5600K units to better render the true colors of the paint and finish — as the autos will be seen in showroom and natural environments.”
Earlier in the season, the Christie team had already tested out a fixture that combined these and other relevant prerequisites. Elation Professional’s Design Par 575D is a 575W MSR type discharge fixture with a par reflector and features the full-range motion of a typical moving head fixture — 630° or 540° pan (user selectable) and 265° tilt — along with four lens options ranging from wide to very narrow. The Design Par does not have color mixing or other features typically found on a standard full-featured moving head, so it’s significantly less expensive without sacrificing quality.
Charnetski used 265 Design Par 575Ds in the GM booth, almost exclusively for the vehicle feature lighting. While at past shows GM used colored light from CMY fixtures to differentiate between its brands, this year the company wanted its booth to have a balanced all-white, open look. With its high color temperature and consistent field, Charnetski said the Design Par 575D delivered.
“The client really liked the white intensity of the exhibit — the overall clean kind of look it has,” he said. “They also liked the convenience of the remote focus in a basic daylight unit — the fact that when things changed and vehicles needed to move, we just got the programmer online and made it happen in a fraction of the time than with a normal fixed focus unit.”
The Design Par 575D provides all this at a great price, Charnetski added. “In an economic environment where it is no longer just a request, but a requirement to cut costs, the Design Par gave us a way to get the job done for 2009 for a very manageable price. It certainly fit our need to deliver within a very targeted budget while providing the absolute best in illumination and focus with as much flexibility as possible.”
For more information, please visit www.elationlighting.com and www.christielites.net.
