where to be seen

New Year's Eve@Sanctuary '96.

"Someone get these broken condoms
out of the spooge on the dance floor!"
-Bartender during cleanup.

These are some of the shots taken from the New Years Eve party at the NightClub that had the battery of Telebeams as well as other lighting appointments and show the environment described in "Trial Balloons".

This is a shot of the Columns in question that were used to encircle the dance floor within the perimeter of Telebeams. The total height for the columns were over 20 feet above the dance rails which they were secured to-and then the bases were hidden with mechanics once the set-up was complete. These are taken during the early set-up and light trials.

In this case the set-up is still in progress and the columns haven't been set quite as close as they ended up and haven't been set at the same height. Additionally, the only source of light being used is a utility light which was not on during the course of the evening.

The total project entailed: a number of pearl string arches (final set-up was tight on time to permit full arches) over front-club and members as well as the rear-club dance stage , 2-600 balloon drops, the interior wall/columns for the dance area as well as numerous bouquets placed in both the front jazz-fusion club as well as the dance club.

The really nice thing is that with the variety of capabilities comes an arsenal of potential for any balloon decorations that you would want to deploy in such a space-and provides an additonal selling point on the marketing end.

In this case-for a new year's eve bash-I took advantage of a 10 perimeter spot arrangement after watching some of the pro- grams that had been put though their paces over the course of a number of weeks previous to the installation.

Here is a 3 second exposure of what the project looked like being illuminated solely by the TelaBeam System. The only reason that it looks more white than usual is that there were about 6 full color sweeps in progress during the time of exposure-using all color guns. If nothing else you can see what combined light looks like.

The units were in 2 banks of 3 in the forward corner closest to the dance floor-with 2 banks in the rear (shown) bracketed by 2 lines of additional non-servo assisted lights.

Additionally, There were 2 pair of large-scale strobes mounted directly to the ceiling that were used when all the lights on the grid were turned off. The resulting flash also disapated nicely over the spread of the interior enclosure of balloon walls-although the effect was fairly blinding and knocked out night-vision for a few seconds. At least this was confirmed by dancers falling over themselves in the evening- and all before the bottles were uncorked.

This is another long exposure that shows more color as the sweeps were slowed. Shown is one of the drops as well as the tops of the columns where you can see the color effect significantly better than in the previous exposure

You can also see one of the infamous strobes just to the right of the drop. All of the rig points were not attached in proxy to any water mains, or electrical conduits. Additionally some of the banks of lights were moved at the last minute to provide enough clearance for the drops which were rigged to the bar and the DJ booth respectively.

I think the only thing that worked out better than the logistics, and the effects worked out with the light-effects operator, was the fact that these pictures even came out of total darkness without serious motion blurring.

Send any of your decorating
stories/tragedies/exploits/sucesses/observations
for posting to Montgomery Gabrys/mgabrys@netherworld.com