There are some events, conferences, & festivals in our portfolio that we are lucky enough to get to work on as they develop from year to year, like TEDxCharlottesville which we talked about back in January. Another one of our annual favorites is the Virginia Film Festival's Opening Night Gala! This event is held every year at the Jefferson Theater, and it provides a unique challenge to create a new look in the same space - one with lots of existing ornament - every year.
2012
In its first year being held at the Jefferson, we used our frazzle lanterns and a projection screen to add some visual interest to the stage area. We projected black & white photos of film stars onto the faux balconies on either side of the main space for an old Hollywood feel, and used colorful lighting to increase the ambience.
2014
By 2014, we were venturing into the exciting world of projection mapping! This year's event was based largely around the premiere of the locally-filmed movie Big Stone Gap, so the aesthetic direction was to use fall imagery to evoke the feeling of the Blue Ridge mountains. We created video content to fit this vision, mapped it onto the walls of the space, and topped it off with an extra-large projection screen onstage to display Film Festival branding material.
2015
The following year, we created some new projection content to better incorporate the festival's new spectrum of branding colors. We also added some hanging Edison bulbs onstage to bring a more rustic feeling to the space.
2016
In 2016, we switched out the onstage projection screen for a unique LED video wall configuration. We also added rain curtain to the stage set to warm it up a bit & add some sparkle, and created more ambient, high-energy projection content for the proscenium and walls.
2017
This year, we worked more of the branding colors into the lighting and revamped the LED wall layout to be more conducive to the Film Festival's existing content. Because fireflies were a major component in this year's poster design, we used a disco ball to splash firefly-like lighting around the space in lieu of projection mapping. We also added string lights to the staging to enhance the ethereal feel.
We're honored to have been involved in this event for so many years, and our long-standing relationship & close connection to the festival allow us to create innovative decor designs while maintaining a thread of stylistic continuity from year to year.