High Impact Design For Range Rover’s Evoque Live
‘Evoque Live’ was the name given to the Roadshow series of events running between 20th May and 5th June at Earls Court London, NEC Birmingham and at Manchester Central to allow members of the motor trade and Range Rover devotees to be among the first to get up close to the all-new Range Rover Evoque.
To celebrate their groundbreaking vehicle, manufacturer Land Rover, hosted a ‘fashion show’ style visionary spectacle. Held in an intimate atmosphere with only 160 seats per show, the performance was a fully integrated and choreographed production. Featuring cutting-edge video, lighting and automation technology, professional dancers, catwalk models and performance artists. The spectacle culminated in the Evoque’s reveal.
The show was commissioned by The Event Business, on behalf of Land Rover, and they engaged The Doll's Lee Lapthorne to create a show that embodied a fusion of style and fashion. Lapthorne was a perfect choice of Director as his award-winning productions are regularly the highlight of fashion weeks in London, Milan and Paris, and the UK’s Clothes Show Live. Lee then turned to the creative team; Nigel Catmur (Lighting and Design) , Paul Devine (Design), Colin Rozee (Visual Content), Doug Haywood (Music), Ashley Wallen (Choreographer) and Harriett Jagger (Stylist) and challenged them to ‘imagineer’ an innovative technical format for a new style of car launch.
Catmur commented: “Lee gave us a strong visual steer before the project set off on its long evolutionary journey over a period of 10 months. I was determined to mis-direct the audience by making them feel they were attending a classic style power point presentation and then rip the head off it. We put the audience on a revolve and after a boring voice over we spun them 180-degrees and hit them with large format projection imagery spread across 18 (9 wide by 2 high) rear projection screens wrapped around them in two thirds of a circle. Paul Devine had devised and designed a brilliant system where the screens and rear projectors were built into a customised frame, a bit like and enormous old speaker horn, allowing them to move back, forth and up and down on tracks. With all these axes of movement we could take the audience into a whole new space where live performance sympathetically engaged with the technology driven by Doug Haywood’s soundtrack and consolidated by Colin Rozee's stunning imagery. Then in the finale scene of the 25 minute presentation we spun them back to their starting position where the original screen had flown up to reveal two of the cars surrounded by the light of God.”
“One of the main challenges presented by the movement of the 18 screen boxes was where on earth to place the lights. I decided to create 8 radial spine trusses positioned in between the tracks for the screens. These dropped down towards the back and connected to a 5m vertical truss. Each truss was loaded with the same equipment creating a uniformity around the whole space. Knowing that we had a very limited amount of time on site relative to the complexity of the show I used Wysiwyg to pre-visualize not just the lighting but all the automation. This proved invaluable allowing us to choreograph the movements and timings of the technology before arriving on site.“
“The show was divided into 3 scenes in reference to the 3 models of the car that are available, Pure, Dynamic and Prestige. Each scene having its own distinct look which was coordinated across the clothes, the choreography, the visuals and the lighting coming together to produce a very high impact 25min presentation which the clients and audience were totally delighted with.”
The show was programmed by Catmur on a Roadhog Full Boar which controlled the lighting and the 4 catalysts and, by no means least, the cue lights for the automation all synchronised to the music using SMPTE timecode which also fed straight into the Laser controller which ran the 3 Compact-6 white light RGB lasers programmed by Rupert Morse.
ELP were appointed as lighting suppliers and brought it in on budget and on time with their exceptional crew under crew chief Mark Gardiner. Gardiner commented “This was a very intense project from a production point of view, comprising seven live shows per day, integrating a revolving audience seating platform, various moving structures, 19 video screens, 20 projectors plus a high impact live performance. A huge amount of lighting and video kit were enclosed in a fairly tight area to maximize the intimate feel, which meant that we had to rig everything precisely to within a few millimeters.”
ELP also provided all the power distribution for each production department including sound, video, automation and for the car demonstrator exhibition which ran alongside the live show. As well as all the emergency lighting in the enclosed performance space.
With such an intense performance schedule, complex set and tracking systems, everything had to run like clockwork so it’s a credit to this highly experienced ELP team that everything ran smoothly across the entire event series.
The projection was provided by XL Video under the supervision of James Cooksey and his team of Jim Fisher and Alex Roberts who took on the immense task of lining up and colour balancing the 20 projectors.
Lighting Equipment: 25 x Mac 700 Profiles, 16 x Alpha Beam 300s, 6 x Alpha Beam 700s, 7 x Atomic 3000s, 17 x Mac2000 Washes, 24 x Mac 301s, 10 x Mac 600s, 8 x Mac 500s, 28 x Thomas Pixel Pars, 24 x Sunstrip Active DMX, 16 x Chroma Batten 50, 48 x Chromstrips, 55 x Source 4 Profiles, 8 x 2-Light Blinders, 5 x 8-Light Blinders, 64 x PAR 64s, 41m Pixelite FlexLED, 2 x DF50s, 4 x Jem ZR33 Smoke Machines
Lighting Crew: Mark Gardiner (Crew Chief), Paul Tibbles, Colin Jones, John Murray and Matt Lee.
Lasers: 3 x 6w ER COM6 Lasershow System Supplied by E R Productions
Projection: 4 x Catalyst Media Servers (3 of which drive 6 outputs via “triple head to go” hardware), 20 Image Pro HD Scan Converters enabling Native SDI Resolution from content to projection.