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February 23, 2006
When Plasma and LCD flatscreens began to really take off in rental and staging, I saw them as great breakout room or tradeshow rental items. With regard to their use in staging, I thought to myself, "Somebody tell me when they come in jumbo size, like 9x12 feet."
What I didn't see coming was another really innovative use that has kept them in the trucks and on the stage when we do large events.
They're scenery.
In the last year, I've begun to see them in a wide variety of on-stage settings. While they've always been good as podium or speaker confidence monitors, they're really coming into their own as great props.
Some of the most interesting places I've seen them so far:
As windows in a set designed to look like a house exterior (with a character for a soon to be announced product occasionally peeking through the "curtains" at various windows, keeping the audience looking);
As colored squares in a game show set (simply manipulated by RS232 used to change their no-signal background color);
As front panels of a podium (which allowed a really dour CEO to get laughs as the rotating company logo was replaced with a view of his legs in Bermuda shorts and sandals behind the podium);
As giant changeable scoreboard letters in a baseball-themed meeting (driven by six computers with JPEG pictures of real, peeling scoreboard letters);
As a collection of animated characters set into a backdrop, where the characters held conversations with each other (played back through multiple synchronized Adtec MPEG players controlled by Fathom player-control software).
Flatscreens even made their way on to the stage in the events submitted in last year's Rental & Staging Systems Awards. One of the best visual applications I saw in the entries (although far from the only one) was in Colortone's setup for its Ernst and Young tour, where they were used both as scenery and as podium signs. I thought the application clever not just because it was visually appealing, but also because it was easily applicable in a multitude of settings (nice for a tour) and because it was entered in the "under 50K" cost staging category, where this level of creativity isn't found every day
. (See the feature on an Ernst & Young event in this issue, where plasmas are used on stage in a similar manner.)
In fact, flatscreens have worked their way into the staging business as everything from posters to preview monitors. One of the best uses I saw this year was large plasmas as control monitors, using a windowing controller. Instead of a giant forest of preview monitors for a show with a large number of video sources, the crew used a single large plasma and a sequenced windowing controller to present only the previews needed for the next segment of the show.
The decision was driven by the need to use a very small space for control, and to reduce potential visual confusion in a complex repeating show. While I'm personally a bit hesitant to use a piece of gear this electronically complex for preview, many of today's video engineers aren't, and it certainly reduced the clutter on the control table and the jungle of cabling beneath it.
So where do we go from here? Two things will continue to drive flat panels into our market--imagination and technology. On the imagination front, the people in our industry already have plenty. So I know I'll see several new uses that I haven't been able to think of in this year's Rental & Staging Systems Awards, and I can't wait.
On the technology front, there are several things that have the potential to increase the penetration of flat panels in our market. The plasma and LCD manufacturers are in a race to make them bigger, and we're already seeing prototypes exhibited over 100 inches diagonal. Soon, they'll be limited only by weight and clumsiness, except for the second area of technological advancement: lighter and even flexible substrates. As the panels get larger, new types of glass and plastics will be used to make them lighter and more durable until flexible flatscreen surfaces are available, and that's when we'll eliminate another technology-the inherently space-wasting projector. So someday, we'll simply unroll the large flatscreen behind the stage. This will simplify lots of things. It will make lighting easier, make stage and element placement more flexible, and eliminate the large cones of wasted cubic space caused by projectors.
In the meantime, can somebody help me lift this 61-inch plasma onto the stand?
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