Live Design: One might ask what a Swedish beauty care company is doing at CES—Consumer Electronics Show—where one expects the gadgets of the future, but boy did Foreo raise eyebrows with the theatricality of their show, from the sound of chainsaws to gas fumes, and vials of pink liquid offered by scientists in white lab coats for visitors brave enough to imbibe. The booth caused quite the uproar with long lines to be part of The Foreo Experience in Las Vegas, January 7-12, 2018.
4 comments:
This exhibit sounds a lot like arcade to me! They used professional theatrical designers to create a 30-minute experience in a tiny space to exhibit a brand new facial product, of all things. I loved hearing the designer’s testimonials about the struggles of the confines of the place, especially for the sound and lighting departments. CES has super strict restrictions about how much sound can leak from the booth, and Brian Gale, the lighting designer was asked to do this on fairly short notice but still managed to scramble up some instruments and a programmer and prove that the show must go on! This specific piece seems like an experience that most Carnegie Mellon students in the design and production program would be prepared for because it’s hectic, it’s on a short time limit, and it’s creating an experience in a box! This also sounds like something that I would be happy to participate in as an observer or as a designer.
I would not have thought that these boths would have been made by theater designers. I wonder how much further towards theater these boths are going to come or if they are going to branch into something different. The challenges of how to construct that both that plays by the rules and yet still is the desired the experience is very interesting. Keeping the sound inside the booth, would not have been a challenge that I would have thought about, but makes sense. The show floor can not get above a certain volume, yet the both wants you to be immersed in their experience. Also, not having a board op seems to be a large challenge. I wonder if this system of running cues would work in other aspects of live theater and end up eliminating board ops completely. Although it may seem unlikely, it fun to think about how these boots could influence theater, since theater seems to be pretty heavily influencing them.
The ore and more I learn about sound design the more I find that system design is something that fascinates me. In the case of all productions theatrical or not, there are restriction in which the designer must know and take account for when designing their system so they can translate their design idea into reality within the constraints. In this case, it was the dB limit and the space restriction. Both of these constraints had to be heavily considered by the designer and played a heavy hand in the system design of the space. This process of design with constraints is like a puzzle. You have solve the puzzle without changing the solution but you have to dodge and duck and find ways around the metaphorical spikes, motes, and hedges that are in the way. This problem solving is a fascinating process that came into this design process for something that usually isn’t considered theatrical is a mind puzzle for the designer that he tacked with grace and ingenuity.
This is a really interesting piece to read about. I find it really interesting that theatrical designers were the ones who came together to create this piece. It is a good reminder that the way in which theatrical designers are trained leaves their options open to apply themselves to all sorts of environments due to the somewhat patchwork-of-every-other-industry nature of theatre. The sound system design is something that is really interesting to me merely because I know very little about it. To me, I see being able to create a way to control and focus sound as an incredible feat to be accomplished, especially in this case because of the added factors of maintaining dimensionality to the sound while still overpowering the noise coming from the show floor. Altogether this sounds like something that I would be very interested in experiencing, and then getting to physically lay eyes on the technical side of the space.
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