During the summer of this year I was approached and commissioned by one of the market leaders in stage entertainment lighting to produce a set of rendered artwork for a new lighting product launch show at the Excel, London.
The company was ROBE Lighting and with a small amount of company research I quickly realised they were both providing state of the art products and working on some of the biggest stage lighting projects in the world.
The brief for the project revolved around producing high resolution, large format 3D renderings of a specific architectural design named ‘The Piazza’. A reference image was provided with some rig dimensions for 8 pieces of artwork which would cover the 4 walls of the exhibition hall (2 for each wall, an upper and lower panel) from wall to wall and floor to ceiling.
The 3D model required very specific dimensions to suit the lighting rigs and exhibition centre size and was modelled on a 1:1 scale in 3DS Max. Each wall length and lighting rig position was different so the model needed to be tweaked to produce each wall panel accurately.
Once each panel was rendered as a complete image it needed to be de-constructed into printable sections with a maximum size of 6m x 3m. Each piece of artwork (the biggest being 21m wide) was divided up into these sections and sent to a Birmingham based print studio where it was then printed on to fabric at 160dpi.
The printed sections were then sewn and joined together using Velcro strips to make up each of the 8 panels of the final artwork. These were then mounted on the exhibition walls with sections cut away to accommodate the lighting rigs that would be showing off ROBE Lightings new products.
An additional commission was also requested for high resolution artwork that was in keeping with the wall panel artwork but was to be printed to vinyl wrap rather than fabric. This was of a clock tower and bar that would be a central feature piece of the exhibition hall, an exhibition entrance section was also required to be in keeping with the ‘The Piazza’ style.
The product launch exhibition for ROBE Lighting took place at the Excel, London between the 4th–6th of October 2015 and was a great success. Future promotional events are also planned for a show in Frankfurt, Germany in the spring 2016.
