The venue's owners wanted to appeal to wide mix of students, young professionals and sports fans, and approached Metropolis on the strength of their other work in this field which includes the current Sports Café brand roll out.
For the first floor Common Room - in a converted Post Office warehouse building - they wanted to create a stimulating and lively environment throughout the bars and large pool playing area with the imaginative use of sound, lighting and AV. They also wanted colour changing LED lighting in the street side windows and below the pool tables.
The project was managed for Metropolis by Stuart Clowes. The client's specific LED lighting requirements were an ideal opportunity to utilise the new Cove Strip which is made from tri-coloured LEDs.
The system is DMX controlled and features and advanced blending system to create coherent pastel colours. Thirty-one 500mm. strips were used along the windows, located in the frames. A total of 24 customised Met3 Cove Strips, each 1.6 metres long - slightly oversized - are used under the pool tables to create an ambient glow throughout the room.
Other lighting includes 10 x 1m strips down the bar and four Met3 TC12s (the Met3 colour changing PAR 56 equivalent) which were used to light the roof beams. The roof beams were one of the original and charismatic building features that were retained.
All lighting, including four Robe 160 Spots that Metropolis specified for the dancefloor, are controlled by a LightProcessor QCommander console which was programmed by Maria Jenkins.
The clients wanted large screens all around the venue, so two 50 inch plasmas were picked for the main bar, with a third in the member's area, plus twenty 42 inch plasmas dotted all around the place. The all-plasma look was chosen to give it an air of sophistication and style. Large sports events are catered for by a 12ft roll down electric screen in the dancefloor area, fed by a 3000 ANSI lumen Mitsubishi projector.
For audio, Metropolis once again specified the HK brand, "for its quality, reasonable price and because it's a good all-round system that's well tried and tested by us," says Clowes. The dancefloor speakers are four IL12s - from the Installation range - joined by 12 pairs of IL8.2s distributed around the bar, all processed via an Allen & Heath IDR8 digital processor.
A Cloud 24 zoner splits the first floor venue into four sound areas - dancefloor, bar, pool area and members room.
Amplification is QSC throughout - RM1450s. This is also a well-used Metropolis installation product - as featured in all their Sports Café installations - where they have proved reliable.
For the DJ booth, Clowes chose a Stanton dual CD player, Formula Sound Mixer and Technics SL1210 dex, together with two self powered monitors, "all good industry standard kit," he says.
The main overall challenge was in creating the precise atmosphere, look and feel throughout the environment demanded by the client. "They were very clear about this, and we worked closely with them to ensure the technology concurred with and aided their overall vision," says Clowes, adding that the Metropolis team was confident that its chosen products would give the client their required creative space.
The installation was co-ordinated on-the-ground for Metropolis by Paul Dalpra, one of their northern based engineering team.
(Chris Henry)
