Whiz-Bang Entertainment

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Looking for the latest in whiz-bang entertainment technology for your next event? The trend toward the high-tech entertainment devices has event planners and clients clamoring for the biggest, best, most stunning entertainment displays available.

As an event planner, no one expects you to have written the book on such high-tech offerings. However, being a savvy, one-step-ahead-of-the-trend professional is in your best interests, and inspires the respect, referrals and repeat business of your clients. Here’s what you need to know.

The Experts Speak Out

K. Lee Harvey, owner of KLH Projects Inc., a full-service production company, and the founder and co-owner of SenovvA, a video staging company that has worked on this year’s Academy Awards, MTV Awards and Daytime Emmys, says the two hottest trends now are the VisionPlex and FogScreen.

The VisionPlex, which allows many projectors working together to create an image, is a high-resolution projection system capable of shooting projection on any surface, even if it’s a 3-D surface.

The award-winning FogScreen, which has made a big enough splash to be known by some as the “innovation of the decade in audiovisual technology,” is a device that produces a “wall” by throwing down a fine mist of water on which video is then projected. The results? An ethereal, shimmering image.

The applications are many, says Harvey. “It could be used for a logo. It could be used at the party for appearing and disappearing images. You can turn it on and off, or fade images in and out.”

Bill Jett, vice president of AV Concepts, says he’s seen a trend toward a variety of 16 x 9 video-formatted applications used with high-definition content. These allow video playback for whatever message the group wants to send its attendees, while doubling as a scenic backdrop, since the screen is so large. The result? A dramatic, dynamic format.

Another application, the Catalyst DL-1, is a video projector that’s actually housed within a moving “light-type” instrument. “Now we can move video images in different places at any time. … It’s giving a lot more options to producers who want to do many different things with actual moving video,” says Jett.

Other high-tech devices include LED drapes or curtains, which are decorative lighting with strings of miniature LEDs; the Stealth Screen, a see-through LED screen that goes in front of projection elements, providing a new option for depth and image quality; and VersaTUBES (by Element Labs), which are fluorescent tubes made of LEDs that process video by allowing you to put images through them.

Gregory Cohen is one of the principals at Unlimited Visibility Light Inc. (UVLD), whose work includes projects for BMW, GM, Mercedes, IBM, Victoria’s Secret, FedEx and Oprah, as well as the NBC Christmas in Rockefeller Center. In the recent General Motors Master Dealer Meeting, UVLD utilized some of these elements.
“What made that kind of cool is we’re starting to take low-resolution video, so the video where the pixels are bigger and there are fewer pixels than you’d have on your television, so it allows you to use those either in lighting fixtures, so they just become a way for us to express color or texture, or in one interesting way, through the use of media servers, we can actually drive the content on them,” says Cohen. “We can actually create things that we put up there that look like moving video or just text, or forming logos.”

According to Doug “Spike” Brant, co-owner of ArtFag LLC, the trend has been pushing toward video becoming a regular part of everything. At the same time, many low-res LED applications are available. “There are all these different surfaces that are kind of blurring the lines between lighting and video. Video can compete with lighting, LED lights, LED products…the technology is overwhelming everything right now,” says Brant.

Another hot item is high-definition (HD) video. “Everyone’s throwing around HD and you want to do HD, but it’s just a pretty new technology that the tools aren’t really available right now to do everything in HD,” says Brant. He notes that there are hardly any HD touring systems available, but that HD is right on the cutting edge.

Behind the Screens

So what do you need to know about these new-fangled technologies?

UVLD’s Cohen says that with events, there is a constant battle to get away from the sameness, and make each event different. With the low-res video coming into the event world, he says, “I think we’re going to be able to present [clients] with a visual landscape a lot more exciting than the usual … feel that seems to dominate events.”

Jett agrees. “There’s a fine line where it has to be produced to accent certain parts of the production. So, if your CEO is coming in to make a major introduction about a new product or something of that nature … that’s where you’d use this sort of technology. To really emphasize certain aspects of whatever your meeting is about.”

After all, no matter how amazing the high-tech elements are, it’s vital that these cool elements not overpower the event. “The ultimate challenge lies in a happy medium between being cutting edge and still create an intimate performance that’s appropriate for whatever the act is…to not let the technology overwhelm the artist, which I’ve definitely danced on the edge of a few times,” Brant says. “On a huge event, [event planners] are definitely looking for some kind of whiz-bang, and ‘keep it simple…’ is not the approach that’s always taken.”