ANY film student knows that lighting is lan integral part of setting a scene. So when FilmL.A., the recently reformed nonprofit that promotes Los Angeles as a location for filmmaking, wanted to dazzle guests including politicos and Hollywood heavyweights, they turned to Culver City, Calif.-based Kinetic Lighting to light the March launch event.

Kinetic lighting designer David Jacobi used lighting effects to enhance the site — a room at L.A. Center Studios, the new home of FilmL.A.'s offices. The event room, a former company cafeteria painted a dull military green, needed work to make it event-worthy. “We wanted to transform this commercial-looking facility into a modern, hip nightclub, creating multiple environments in one space,” Jacobi says. “This required a great deal of imaginative lighting and projection techniques, not to mention a few buckets of paint.”

While generators were brought in to power skytracker searchlights — a requirement at any Hollywood event — Jacobi had only limited house power in the raw space. To overcome the problem, he used 20 Color Kinetics' Colorblast 12 LED fixtures, which are so power-efficient that dozens of them can be run off house power alone, to light a 120-foot-long wall with a color-changing wash. The LED lights also lit up the 40-foot-long bar, which featured atmospheric tube lighting along its edge. Arriving guests were greeted by a theatrically lit façade onto which the Kinetic crew projected an enormous FilmL.A logo using a Finelite projector. Inside the main event space, lighting and video images entertained guests. Two video projectors turned the venue walls into screens, showing clips of movies filmed in L.A. Jacobi also used LED fixtures to complement the video presentations, he says, because doing so created “an almost unlimited color palette while using only a minimal amount of power.” The eye-catching effect “got everyone immersed in the video without the need for larger screens,” he adds, while reinforcing the movie-making theme.

Kinetic Lighting 3583 Hayden Ave., Culver City, CA 90232; 310/837-3204; www.kineticlighting.com

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