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PRG Europe on the Road for Ford
PRG Europe has once again worked with design and communications agency Imagination on showing off the Ford Motor Company’s brands. At the beginning of the year, Ford launched two new models of Transit van, while more recently, all the company’s marques were on display at the British International Motor Show, which returned to London after 30 years’ absence. And now, PRG Europe has supplied 40 Vari*Lite luminaires and two Wholehog IIs for the Paris Motor Show.
In February, PRG Europe supplied lighting and control for a presentation over three days of two new Transit models to dealers from across Europe. At a casino hotel in Cannes, Imagination built a ‘room within a room’ which was lit in Ford’s corporate colours of blue, cyan and white. Meanwhile, video walls showed off the new models. “Due to the confines of the space, we used the old rock and roll principles of audience blinding to assist in the reveal of the vehicles, along with plenty of smoke and haze,” explains Imagination’s in-house lighting director Mike Sobotnicki. “The vehicles had felts over them, which were removed by mechanisms on stage using a time coded sequence from the Wholehog desk. The challenge was to create maximum impact using minimum resources, because we didn’t want guests walking into a space which looked like a lighting rig. We kept it very clean and low-key, using Vari*Lite fixtures to pretty much do the entire job.”
Sobotnicki used a blue light to enhance the ‘bricks’ placed at one end of the room and to create interesting looks for the reveal process.
Then at the end of July, Imagination lit the huge Ford stand at the British International Motor Show in London using a colourful array of light from Vari-Lite fixtures to create an interesting display which drew attention to the stand – recreating what had been done in the US, complete with corporate branding.
“All the fixtures were concealed within the roof of the stand itself,” explains Mike, “so that it looked as if you were in a clean showroom environment.”
At 3,300 square metres, the huge stand was the largest interior display to be featured at the show and included Ford, Aston Martin, Jaguar, Land Rover and Mazda. “We were delighted to be able to help Imagination once again,” says project manager for PRG Europe, John McEvoy. “Because of the concealed lighting, we had to carefully schedule our work with Ford’s fixing of the trussing so as not to get in each others’ way. We supplied 120 Vari*Lite moving heads, including 52 VL2000 washes for the Mazda area alone.
“We supplied three Wholehogs, one of which was used in Mazda’s area to control a weather sequence as well as the lighting. A video wall played a ‘weather forecast’ predicting it would be bright and sunny, but with heavy showers over the Docklands – at which point a time code from the desk raised the roof of the convertible Mazda MX2 as it started ‘raining’. Eight 3kW Diversatronic strobes were used to simulate lightning.”
At just six days, load in was significantly shorter than usual for a motor show, with PRG Europe providing seven crew plus two of the three board operators. Everything was set to time codes, so only one person needed to be on standby on site, to switch everything on at the beginning of each day and ensure everything ran smoothly.
20th October 2006
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