The intense four-date back-to-back tour visited Dublin, Glasgow, Leeds and London. It is L'Oréal's widest attended event showcasing the latest cutting, colouring and styling trends for AW15, offering live and close-up education from L'Oréal's team of ID artists across four evenings of action, inspiration and fashion.
CPL's project manager Lee Gruszeckyj worked closely with Andy Oswin from producers Bright, who initiated the roadshow's overall concept, set and video design and developed the video content to ensure the presentation environment was as cutting edge as the hair-art.
The show design involved a 20m long runway denoted by a strip of white vinyl on the floor. Along this were three equidistantly spaced 2 x 2m staging podiums, with the audience seated down both sides. The models sat on these whilst the various hair treatments and styling took place with the ID artists describing their actions in a choreographed sequence as the styling progressed.
In between the stage podiums were four 'pods' constructed from black powder coated scaff / pipe-clamped frames, forming deconstructed boxes 2m tall by 1m wide.
Three 1m long Showtec Octostrip LED battens, picked for their thin low profile, outlined these pods - attached via trigger clamps - producing the rich and vibrant neon colours specified by L'Oréal.
For general lighting, 12 x ARRI 650 Watt fresnels on wind-up stands were located each side of the runway behind the audience seating to cross-light the space which worked highly effectively. These and the LED strips were controlled from an Avolites Quartz desk, a compact and neat solution for a tour of this size.
CPL's crew of four, including Lee, created a whole backstage area with one of their new pipe-and-drape systems complete with baffle walls, and also provided power management backstage for the dressing rooms and model prep areas, etc.
The compact audio system was d&b, utilizing a mix of E6 and Q7 speakers plus 15 inch E-SUBS fed with a combination of announcements and playback music tracks. A Yamaha Q1 desk routed and processed all sources and a selection of mics including Shure radios and DPA headsets were provided for the hair artists.
A FreeSpeak II wireless comms systems ensured that the floor manager and the various technical crew easily kept in touch during the evening shows.
The AV elements comprised a Sony PMW200 camera fitted with a Teradek wireless system that captured the live demo action plus backstage and other interviews, which were output via a switcher to four 55 inch LED screens positioned around the runaway, showing a mix of live camera images, playback visuals and graphics. A highlights video was edited and compiled as the tour progressed.
(Jim Evans)
