Area
July / August 2008
Vauxhall
Opened in 2006, Area is still one of the relatively new venues, which populates the Vauxhall Arches.
A recent upgrade in both lighting and audio systems commissioned by owner Craig Elder sees Area challenging its nearest rivals for the predominately homosexual audience which they all attract.A few years ago there was only one gay club to name in, what the locals call, Vauxhall Cross. However things changed dramatically with the opening of Crash, shortly followed by A:M, Orange and Area’s sister club Fire. The Vauxhall Gay Village as it is now known has grown steadily in popularity.
Elder has previously vamped up Fire, including a spectacular LED set for The Lightbox, one of the rooms at the club. The design brief for Area was simple; to make it even better than Fire. Halo Lighting’s Yann Guenancia, who did the installation at Fire, said: “Fire was a storming success, and the lighting brought the club instant fame. So Area had to top that.” With that in mind Guenancia and his design team Gordon Haslett and Matt Simpson set to work. Being the fourth project working together, Elder had 100% confidence in Guenancia and gave the design team a free hand.
Guenancia says their biggest challenge was the deadline; they had just seven weeks to complete the job. The company developed the ceiling architecture in three layers. Firstly, they had to provide a combined rigging and electrical infrastructure to feed power and hang all the lighting fixtures; then they had to create an adjustable framework from which the repackaged X-Panels could be secured with minimal tolerance. Finally they had to package the fixtures into modular panels 2m and 1m long, and assemble the whole structure on site to create the matrix.
The Unistrut frame contained no fewer than 768 of the X-Panels, hooked up to two dedicated X-Image Pro 36 data. Into this fabric Halo also incorporated 30 x 120 mW laser heads and 30 Studio Due moving lights, which required a mighty drive rack with 57,000 DMX channels. With the grid installed the pixellated display was ready to be animated with lo-res AVI graphics stored on the ArKAos media server, all under the master control of a ShowCAD PC, stationed in the technical booth.
Of the finished article Guenancia said: “On such a big project when everything has been custom made and you see it all finished, it takes your breath away and it can also be very emotional.”
Audio Energy installed new audio equipment alongside the Halo installation. Director Chad Jenner told mondo*dr, similarly to Guenancia, they too had worked with Elder on other projects and commented that they have a good relationship. “Craig allows us to just get on with what we’re good at and that’s the way we like to work,” he said.
During the install plans were changed slightly and the sound system for the embankment at the front of the venue was upgraded. The upgrade meant that unlike before when only background music could be played from the embankment, DJ’s can now use it too. With the newly installed equipement DJ’s are now able to play a full gig, from the embankment.
Jenner and his team installed was a bespoke Outline Doppia PA system powered by Nova Audio DXP3600 amplifiers designed by Audio Energy Ltd and is networked to the clubs multi zones and controlled by BSS Soundweb. They were very pleased with the outcome and felt that the original design brief of making the club better than Fire, was fulfilled.
