MIAMI – When the legendary Fontainebleau hotel re-opened after a $1 billion makeover, one of its most anticipated entertainment spots was LIV, a lavish Vegas-style mega-club with VIP panache. Taking its name from the Roman numeral for “54” (the Fontainebleau’s original birth year), LIV offers 30,000 sprawling square feet of high-energy music and drop-dead glamour under a huge dome, with three full-service bars, and six private VIP skyboxes on a balcony overlooking the dance floor.
Stephen Lieberman of SJ Lighting (www.sjlighting.net), who was called in to take over the lighting design midway into the project, recalls his directive: “Make it the coolest club ever.” With that humble edict, Lieberman was given free rein with no design restrictions other than an existing support structure that had been built inside the colossal dome. “We went ahead and basically started from scratch using the structure they had in there,” said Lieberman. “We put in an entirely new system that we thought was appropriate -- and it came out great.”
That system is built around Elation Professional’s Design Spot 575E, an intelligent 575-watt moving head. Twenty-two Design Spot 575Es are used throughout the club -- “virtually everywhere,” said Lieberman. The feature-rich fixture includes CMY color mixing, gobo and animation wheels, and loads of other effects.
The multifunctionality of LIV’s spaces was one reason why Lieberman chose the versatile Design Spot 575E as his main moving light. “There are VIP booths on the balcony level, but in actuality, the whole club is pretty much like a VIP area,” Lieberman explained. “Even on the main floor there are banquettes and VIP tables. So this is a true multipurpose venue -- any of these environments can be anything.”
And so can the Design Spot 575E. . . With a Variable Frost Filter that’s capable of producing beams ranging from hard to soft-edge, the unit can “fill the gap between wash and spot,” said Lieberman, and handle whatever illumination need is called for. “I figured let’s get the best of both worlds and not limit myself to a wash fixture for the majority of my lights.” The Design Spot 575E’s multitude of other features and effects enhanced its versatility, while its price made it an unbeatable value, added Lieberman. “It’s a great fixture – with 2 rotating gobo wheels, an animation wheel, color mixing, an iris and a zoom. It’s got all the features of an $8,000 fixture at a much lower cost.”
With LIV’s massive cubic footage to fill, different layers of light were called for. To provide detail around the balcony soffit, Lieberman added four smaller Elation moving heads, the 300-watt Design Spot 300E. “It’s got almost the same features as the bigger light,” said Lieberman. “But since they were going to be in close proximity to the crowd, I didn’t want to put a 575-watt fixture in their face. The 300 gives a nice little layer of detail at about 10’ off the floor, where everything else is high up in the ceiling.”
To add a layer of light in the dome itself, Lieberman used another Elation fixture, the Impression high-power RGB-color-mixing LED moving head. Eight Impressions provide circle detail around the center of the dome. Although extremely compact – just 16 lbs. and able to fit on a 14” center -- the Impression yields a bright color output comparable to a 575W discharge fixture, yet its 90 Luxeon K2 red, green and blue LEDs consume about half the energy. According to Lieberman, the Impression lived up to its name. “I was definitely impressed,” he said. “The weight of the fixture is unbelievable; so are its bright color palettes, speed of movement and range of motion. All these things are major bonuses for the designer – and when you add in the energy-efficiency, there’s a tremendous bonus for the operator too from a cost-benefit standpoint.”
Given the benefits of LEDs, Lieberman went this route for the stage lighting, too. LIV’s stage is lit up by 25 Opti Tri Par LED par cans, which feature Elation’s exclusive TRI LED RGB-color-mixing Technology. Each of the unit’s 18 LED diodes is comprised of, not one, but three different-color LEDs (a red, green and blue), providing the advantage of smoother color mixing and the elimination of multi-color shadows. Along with its rich, brilliant colors, the Opti Tri Par’s 70W power draw has considerably lightened LIV’s electrical load. “The original designer had as many as 96 channels of dimming, and the electrician expressed concern to me about the total draw on the system,” said Lieberman. “So we knocked out all the dimming and replaced it with LED fixtures. We went from probably a 400-amp service to four 20-amp circuits.”
Providing similar power draw benefits are Elation’s DLED 60 LED strips, which are used as curtain lights. “I’ve got five of these strips lighting each of the two sets of curtains,” said Lieberman, “and each group of five is on one 20-amp circuit. And the power’s daisy-chained together. The electrician was ecstatic when I told him I need just one circuit and don’t worry about anything else!”
When the curtain rose on LIV itself, the club lost no time making its mark, hosting the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show after-party the night of its Grand Opening. Since then, the likes of Paris Hilton, Beyonce, Jay Z, Pamela Anderson and P Diddy have passed through its doors. Judging from visitor response, the club’s lighting has won a spot on the A-list too. Said Lieberman, “Every day somebody calls me or sends me an email about how great this place is.”
