UV/FX Produces Dual-Image Backdrops for Southern Comfort
.jpg "Courtesy: UV/FX")
When Mowalla Productions was looking to give their client Southern Comfort an exciting look to their underCOVER concert tour, they contacted UV/FX about their flexible and lightweight dual-image scenery. UV/FX customized it to allow for two scenes to be incorporated into only one piece of scenery so the backdrop could change with little effort.
UV/FX brought in scenic designer Jon Craine to collaborate on the piece. Craine worked with the brand and Mowalla to develop visual imagery that could be applied to a series of soft goods, including a 15-foot tall by 20-foot wide backdrop and two sets of 15-foot tall downstage legs.
Craine provided concept artwork based on the brand’s art direction. Southern Comfort was looking for an image that was inspired by modern rock poster art, yet was true to the brand’s identity. Working within the parameters of the Southern Comfort brand was particularly important considering that the imagery Craine developed would also be applied to marketing and advertising materials.
Craine eventually hit on the concept of a Southern Comfort-inspired city built upon the popular tenants of music. He used the recognizable Southern Comfort bottle as the central unifying compositional device around which the city grew. The music city featured a collage of speaker tower buildings and guitar necks rising around the giant Southern Comfort bottle tower. The name of the heavily branded tour, underCOVER, was featured on a scrolling banner that grounded the entire composition.
The imagery was applied to a central backdrop and modified for application to the downstage legs, which had to be designed to be rigged either horizontally or vertically depending upon the venue. UV/FX artist Rhett Butler produced the scenery using UV/FX’s custom line of clear, ultraviolet-sensitive scenic paints that are completely transparent under regular colored stage lighting, but become colorful and brilliant when viewed under ultraviolet lighting.