The building was previously a classic 1950s cinema, which has been completely gutted and rebuilt by Gomel-based Plaza-Invest who also own another successful club in the town. The Plaza has already become one of the hottest club tickets in town, partly due to it's spectacular lightshow.
The club features three bars and a dancefloor which is the heart of the space and a wide ranging music policy. The owners wanted to have one of the best lightshows in town so they approached Minsk based design, hire and sales company, Art Ramos Studio a.l.c. (ARS) to produce a design, and supply the gear. Art Ramos has been at the forefront of Belarus's professional entertainment industry lighting for 14 years, and joined the Robe team in 2003, when they were looking for a good quality moving light to distribute.
The Plaza Club system was designed by Valery Streltsov, a director and leading creative force at Art Ramos, who have worked with the club owners on previous projects.
The brief was to produce the best lighting show in town and include lots of spot, gobo and colour effects, and have constantly changing lighting on a relevantly small dance floor plus plenty of fog and haze. The budget was also quite limited, so value-for-money was important.
Valery chose the fixtures from Robe's extensive Club range - eight ClubScan 250CTs, two ColorMix 240ATs, 12 ClubSpot 250CTs, 10 ClubWash 250CTs and four Robe Fusions. They were picked for their neat size - as the space is relatively small - they needed to get as many fixtures on the dancefloor as possible - reliability and value for money. "We have used various ranges of Robe lighting devices for different projects but this specific project made Robe's Club range ideal for this installation. Small space of the dance floor required small fixtures to be used, and the result we have received was absolutely fantastic."
He adds that the breadth and dynamics of Robe's club-specific range is a great help for any design, and for the bigger venues, there's also the opportunity to add in fixtures from Robe's live performance ranges as well. "No other company would give me this same choice and value," he states.
Most of the fixtures are attached to ceiling trusses with a few on a small stage at one end of the dancefloor which is sometimes used for live performances, Pas and club shows.
The Robe DMX Control 1024 - the latest of the Robe range of controllers - was specified because it made sense to get a console from the same source, and one that was specifically geared to working with these fixtures. It offers two DMX 512 outputs, controls up to 1024 DMX channels (i.e. 48 lighting fixtures of up to 32 channels each) and supports Robe and all other popular lighting brands. Shows can be created from up to 4752 Scenes, consisting of Presets and Chases. The range of 1152 Shows, Presets and/or Chases can be recorded into 24 Pages.
The fixtures and console were supplied to the customer directly through Art Ramos Studio a.l.c.
(Chris Henry)
