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Digital signage adds kick to Fabulous Palm Springs Follies

Some 21st century technology is adding spice to an early 20th century-style variety act.

May 12, 2011 by Christopher Hall — w, t

A modern-day version of a 1930s and '40s-era Las Vegas-style revue has added some modern-day flair with a digital signage backdrop.

The Fabulous Palm Springs Follies, which performs at the Plaza Theatre in Palm Springs, Calif., recently installed a five-by-five screen video wall in the theater to serve as the backdrop of the show, replacing the curtains and static billboards that had to be rolled on and off stage on tracks.

"All signage used throughout the show was then digitized, and now they've got a lot more creative control to make changes on the fly and update their show throughout the season," said Dennis Pappenfus, a partner in Fluid Sound, the company that installed the video wall.

The video wall is made up of 46-inch NEC X461UN LCD displays with ultra-narrow bezels and NEC's TileMatrix technology for video wall screen synchronization.

"Over the years, we've done some fairly miraculous things in terms of scenery and backdrops," Show producer and host Riff Markowitz said in a recent case study of the deployment from NEC Display Solutions. "The Plaza Theatre was primarily a movie house. It was never intended for this type of production. The stage itself is small, and one wing is 15 feet by 15 feet while the other is 8 feet by 4 feet, so there's not a lot of room to keep boards on the side. There are no flies either, which means we can't drop in scenery from above. We were always making tough choices when it came to setting the proper mood."

Now the show has gone from static images painted on boards to moving imagery, video and animated cartoons as a backdrop.

"They've really grown the visual impact of the show, which was kind of – from the big-picture perspective – the goal of this project," Pappenfus said in a recent telephone interview.

The theater troupe wanted to move away from static signage and do something a little more 21st century, while also staying true to its golden-age roots, according to Phil Borkowski, Pappenfus' partner at Fluid Sound.

"I think a lot of it (the drive to switch to digital signage) came from the show itself, actually freeing up some more stage space," he said. "It's a rather confined stage, so getting rid of the moving marquee walls allowed them to free up a little more space and allowed the production of the show itself to flow a little better."

Also, the video content isn't just loaded on a DVD and played back, Pappenfus said, but rather controlled by the same media server that controls the lighting for the show.

"You've got what went from a stagehand pushing a static sign to the lighting director now in control of this other medium and integrating that medium at the exact right time when it's relevant and important to the show," he said. "So you've got the ability to hit those cues in a much more timely fashion, and that was a pretty big technical requirement."

The backdrops and background videos are now cued up and used just like the stage lighting, he said:

"It's allowed them a greater degree of creative flexibility."

And stage show backdrops are just another one of the many new uses being found for digital signage video walls, Pappenfus and Borkowski said. Their company is working on a video wall installation for a museum complex and has proposed an installation for the Transportation Security Administration's field office in San Diego, for the main operations room, they said.

"We're seeing a distinct growth in the use of video-wall technology," Pappenfus said. "Those are two distinctly different uses, but the idea of a video wall and the flexibility it gives you, whether you're using onboard processing and scaling or external processing really kind of opens things up ... and for whatever reason they're starting to gain quite a big foothold."

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