The event, attended by over 1,200 VIPs, including the world’s press, sponsors, special guests and Renault employees, was staged in Renault’s massive Technocentre in Guyancourt, near Paris.
UK production agency Sprout turned to drapes and materials specialist Blackout Triple E’s Paris subsidiary to assist in the realisation of its design for the launch, with Blackout France’s Dominic Peissel in the role of technical manager for the launch and Fabrice Le Floch overseeing the rigging aspects of the installation.
Peissel’s first logistical challenge was to overcome the sheer size and construction of the Technocentre. As rigging had never been hung from the 30m high atrium ceiling before, Dominic and Fabrice liaised with local structural engineers to establish safe weight loadings. Working to incredibly tight deadlines and even stricter French safety laws, the crew skilfully installed all the points and safety mechanisms to suspend over 40 metres of A-type truss, used for the lighting fixtures, as well as the points to fly the sound rigs.
Blackout France also hung 19 5.5m x 2.65m banners, rigged strategically in the Technocentre’s 6,000sq.m atrium walkÂthrough, used as a lead-in to the launch area. The 200 lantern lighting rig was designed by Martin Locket of Essential Lighting. With the near daylight conditions of the glass-roofed atrium to overcome, his design incorporated over 50 high-impact intelligent fixtures, including Martin MAC 2000s, MAC 500s, Coemar CF 1200s and High End Studio Beam PCs. Another 110 generic fixtures completed the line-up.
The launch area posed numerous acoustic problems, thanks to the reflective glass and steel surfaces. Delta Sound’s Jim Lambert designed the main rig, using 20 L-Acoustics V-Dosc enclosures flown in two clusters and BSS Omnidrives for speaker management.
In view of the size of the building, the stage and set needed to make a major impact. To address this, set designer Steve Kilburn designed a 12m high set for which Stage Co Paris provided the stage structure, blacked out by drapes supplied by Blackout France. Renault’s impressive blue and yellow R202 speed machine was concealed behind a 5.38m x 3.14 LED screen (constructed from Barco Dlite 7 daylight modules) supplied by French rental house Perfect Technologies.
For the reveal sequence, a Stage One Q-Motion control system lifted the screen and other scenic elements out as the car was pushed forward on a tilting, revolving platform.
