Southgate sign shines again with FloppyFlex
- Details
“The main motivation behind the project to revive the Southgate sign was the love the local community has for it,” says Stephanie Carten, marketing manager for Crossman & Company. “We purposely kept the iconic look and stylized script, taking the sign back to its former glory but with a technical edge.”
The famous 26m-tall and 42m-wide Arch has been a pop-culture icon since it was built in 1957. It has appeared in several Hollywood movies, perhaps most famously Tim Burton’s 1990 hit Edward Scissorhands, featuring Johnny Depp. Disney used the shopping centre to shoot scenes for The One and Only Ivan, an adaptation of the Newberry-medal winning novel by Katherine Applegate, released in August 2020, listing actress Angelina Jolie as a producer.
Looking for the best replacement for the old glass neon, Crossman & Company contacted lighting distributors Lamp Sales, who knew exactly who to call. Shortly thereafter, Kyle Ledford, SESCO’s Regional Product Specialist, and TMB’s Chris Curran travelled to Lakeland to assess the task. After a brief review of the project, they had no doubt that FloppyFlex was the right product for the job.
FloppyFlex bends easily and can be supplied cut precisely to spec, in this case fluently following the bends of the legacy sign’s cursive writing. FloppyFlex is a green-friendly, multi-colour, low voltage, easy to install, long-life, decorative lighting system, and is void of the issues usually associated with neon, such as breakage and fire risk. It is also weatherproof, IP rated, and designed for permanent outdoor installation - suitable for Florida’s extreme weather.
Given the age of the sign there were no CAD files, or even drawings available, so the team carefully measured the entire span of the structure to design the FloppyFlex ‘cuts’ and the installation control inputs/outputs using TMB’s RGB FloppyDrives.
A total of 343m of FloppyFlex was used, precisely IP67 factory-moulded for each individual run length. The first 174m were used on the Southgate letters, at two runs per letter. The Shopping Centre letters were based on one run per letter. A further 169m of RGB FloppyFlex LED Neon serviced the top and bottom architectural details. A system of 39 TMB ProPlex FloppyDrive DIN Rail 4x2’s drives were installed to control the FloppyFlex, with full, remote, web-based access. The project was successfully completed earlier this year.
Holiday season visitors to Southgate will experience the landmark arch with a new nightly light-show series. Going forward, the Centre will have almost unlimited options to (remotely) customise their sign for different seasons, holidays, and special events.
