Armani Hotel, DUBAI - 14th June 2011 - Technical services company, Eclipse Staging Services, recently provided 24 Christie MicroTiles™ for telecoms giant, HTC Corporation’s launch of a new series of phones and tablets at Armani Hotel Ballroom, Dubai.
This was the first in a series of product launches planned by HTC. Commissioned by Equity Advertising to provide sound, lighting, video, event management, stage design and build, Eclipse decided to use its newly-purchased Christie MicroTiles in an unusual manner — to form the shape of the HTC logo.
The content represented the applications that are available on the handset — namely the icons of Android App Store, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc.
This was supported by video in the form of a pair of Christie HD8K 3-chip 1080 HD DLP projectors, processor controlled to enable animated background and picture-in-picture.
Said Richard Scott the Eclipse set designer, project manager and show caller, “We showed the client the MicroTiles, and after explaining the concept they decided this would be an ideal solution. Eclipse produced the content as a pixel-mapped video file, with the icons and videos moved around the display as part of the overall sequence.” The video file was fed from a laptop to the Tiles.
The Armani Ballroom was split into two sections for the occasion — one for pre-event cocktails, networking and product demos. The room was separated by a Starcloth on a tab-track, which was opened to reveal the main event space.
Meanwhile, the Christie HD8K projectors were double stacked from the rigging points in the venue. The processor controlled the content from Resolume video software for the animated backgrounds, with PIP from a Macbook for the Keynote presentation file, video drop-ins and live camera relay.
Eclipse also provided lighting in the form of Clay Paky Alpha HPE 1500 spots and washes and a variety of generic lighting was used with a Whole Hog Full Boar lighting desk.
Sound was played back through L-Acoustics 12 XTs and 108P, and mixed from a Yamaha LS9 desk.
HTC was represented by Director of Marketing in EMEA, Vladimir Malyugin, who remarked, “I have run events like this all around the world and the Eclipse team was amongst the best I have ever worked with.”
As for the Taiwanese handset corporation, started by Cher Wang in 1997, this has now overtaken Nokia in market value.