Unlimited Visibility Lighting Design (UVLD) brought the high-tech mystery of the CSI franchise to a corporate show for Best Buy’s Home Theatre division with a set lit primarily with energy-efficient LED fixtures.
The show, dubbed “ CSI : Home Theatre,” was held in the Highlands Club in Hollywood, “an unconventional venue for a corporate presentation,” notes lighting designer Paul Sharwell. “I do a lot of shows for Best Buy, and they’re usually in big convention centers. But for this project we were tasked with lighting a set made of frosted Plexiglas® in a small nightclub. The overall feel was that of an intimate show much like a town hall meeting.”
UVLD supplemented the Highlands Club’s lighting system with Martin MAC 250s and 130 Color Kinetics ColorBlast 12 LEDs. “There was a multitude of plasma screens and the translucent Plexiglas set with a lot of details like odd shaped holes and cubes—features that we needed to design for,” says Sharwell. “We laid out the plot, but it was hard to imagine how to lay out the LEDs. We didn’t have a lot of room behind the set, and it was designed to be mostly backlit.
“So we devised a series of booms lined with ColorBlasts which would have to be adjusted on site,” he continues. “The lights were only about a foot behind the walls, and the set was clearer than we expected, so we covered the back of the Plexiglas with vellum which acted as diffusion to soften the lights. That worked well to give a sense of mystery and cutting-edge technology that referenced both CSI and the home theatre marketplace.”
To carry the feel of the set into the club, additional set pieces were placed throughout the room and were lit with LED fixtures.
Tony Siekman of the WIT Company was the technical director. Kelly Rae Hemenway of Sketch And Design was the set designer.