SAN DIEGO — 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 plasmas in the club, with screens 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” x 7.9” square LED tile from Acclaim Lighting. Each X-Panel contains 25 SMD RGB LED pixels, arranged in a 5 by 5 square.
DMX compatible and controlled by Acclaim’s X-Soft software, the X-Panel can be used for low-res displays that combine video, text and graphics, and is compatible with more than 10 types of software, including JPEG, FLASH, BMP, WMV, MPG, AVI and MOV.
In all, 561 X-Panel tiles were used to build the wall. The X-Panel’s compact size and shape, along with its modular design, led Felix Lighting to choose it for the job.
“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.”
Flexibility was also the reason Felix Lighting 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 protective silicone sleeve, Flex Tape comes in 10-foot spools of 60 2-inch-long strips, each containing 3 SMD LEDs (red, green and blue), which can be cut and re-soldered together to create the desired length.
Strips of Flex Tape — totaling 250’ in all — are used as an RGB color-changing border to highlight 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 allow it to be used with any standard 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.”
On Voyeur’s Stage 2, Felix Lighting designed and installed a contrast to all the technology: 280 dimmable, individually channeled cabaret style lamps, that chase on an uploaded replay unit (AR32). The burlesque-style stage was also designed to add a mix of old-school peep shows and high tech voyeurism in the club’s vibe.
For more information, visit www.acclaimlighting.com, www.elationlighting.com and www.felixlighting.com.
GEAR:
561 X-Panel LED Tiles
2 X36 Nodes
1 X-Soft Server HP
250’ RGB LED Flex Tape
11 PSU/Drivers for Flextape
2 AR32 Playback Systems
5 XFade 6 Control Panels
1 Antari Fazer X-310II
4 grandMA Video Servers
1 grand MA Lite
6 PixalRange Pixal Arc C44
6 Martin MX-10
9 Light-O-Rama 16 ch dimmers #CTB16DWHS
120 11W marquee lamps
8 Thomas Single Lamp Mole Fay’s
5 Mac Mini Computers
5 Axon Media Servers
1 16 Way KVM MAC/PC Switch
4 Christie 5k Video Projectors
2 Marshall VR72DP2C Dual 7” Rack-Mount Video Monitor
3 Marshall VR25p Ten Way 2.5” Rack-Mount Video Monitor
6 15” Flat Screen Computer Monitors
1 Extron 24×24 Composite Video Router
8 Lipstick Style Video Cameras
16 Still Cameras
4 ColorBlast 12 LED Fixtures
1 Doug Fleenor 6-way LED Power Supply
2 Leprecon LD-360HP Dimmer Packs
24 Amber CFL Lamps
28 Kramer CAT5 to Video Adapters
