In the event industry, lighting plays a crucial role. Just like music, you breathe its energy. As a design house, we’re thrilled to have recently incorporated a full-fledge event technology department that allows us to integrate lighting in to our decor in much more in-depth ways than ever before. In this article, we’ll highlight how our young and insanely talented Event Technology Manager, Adam McCarthy, is taking our company into the next frontier with intelligent and interactive light.
We asked Adam to share with us what lighting capabilities he is most excited about offering to our clients. Here, he shares his top three.
Illuminated Designs
Kehoe Designs has long been known for its tailored furnishings, one-of-a-kind art pieces, and custom graphics that give our clients absolutely original looks. But now, with a dedicated lighting design team, we are crafting these decor elements with the added dimension of illumination from the beginning of the design process. In other words, instead of simply adding a light source to a finished product, we create concepts that are designed to take on light and manipulate moods with color shifts, saturated glows and movement. This brings in an entirely new layer that ultimately serves to heighten the overall sensory experience for our guests.
A great example of this is a recent Bar Mitzvah party where the goal was to simulate the high intensity energy of an electronic music festival. To accomplish this, our team of in-house sculptors, painters, and welders worked closely with the lighting team to create a “sober psychedelic” effect with intense color and patterned lights moving within furnishings, sculptural structures and on walls.
Another lighting design we recently debuted is an Edison bulb grid panel, simulating a simplified pixel map that gives us the ability to show shapes or letters, activated by specific sound frequencies in the room. In our day of high tech, LED lighting, these warm toned incandescent lights act as a playful contrast, blending elements of past with the wild potentiality of the future.
Intelligent Lighting
Traditionally, design houses have used light in the form of pin spots and par cans to bring attention to the decor they wish to highlight in the room. But as technology has progressed, lighting has now become a much more interactive part of the party, reacting in realtime to the music and mood with various types of image projections, color intensities, and angles. There are so many options on how to layer light with designs and textures to amplify the energy and to transport guests to a fantasy world of light and color. With Kehoe Designs’ technicians scripting the light story, there’s the added advantage of them being intimately involved in the entire process, injecting illumination in a perfectly complementary way.
Video & Digital Bitmapping
As the world becomes increasingly digitized, so do our design capabilities. For the younger crowds and tech-savvy corporate clients, we’re thrilled to now offer captivating, high energy visuals in the form of video projection. With top designers, audiovisual specialists, and video & graphic teams all working together, the possibilities are truly endless. Custom screens and large sculptural pieces can take on 3D mapped projections. Video imagery and graphic elements blend seamlessly with the overall aesthetic and mood.
A recent example is a party where we used projection blending technology to mimic the Coachella Music Festival horizon with a monster 15’X50’ ‘landscape’ screen. Our video team sourced real sunset footage, layering it with graphics and abstract imagery, to pay tribute to Coachella’s signature themes. Using the latest in intelligent lighting, along with a video jockey employing digital motions graphics programming, the audiovisuals were perfectly synced to the music to electrify the mood.
Adam McCarthy
Event Technology Manager
Kehoe Designs
312.421.0030
www.kehoedesigns.com