The renovation of the former Ole Madrid was inspired by a Radiohead concert. The band's Thom Yorke "had all these lipstick cameras around him, and we're aiming for the same effect," club co-owner Johnny Shockey said recently. "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". Seven of these TVs are positioned inside Voyeur's definitive feature - an LED wall, located behind the DJ Performance area, measuring 30ft wide and 11ft high.
The LED wall isn't just big, it also has a specially-shaped configuration. Cut-outs were made to accommodate the seven inset plasma screens, audio speakers, and several lighting fixtures. Additionally, the wall wraps around two alcoves where dancers perform on raised platforms.
Creating an LED wall to encompass these openings and dimensionality posed a challenge, according to Dave McKinnon of Felix Lighting (La Mirada, California), 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 high-intensity SMD RGB LED pixels, arranged in a 5 x 5 square. DMX compatible and controlled by Acclaim's X-Soft software, the X-Panel is extremely flexible in creating 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.
"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.
(Jim Evans)
