Karin Fong: Viva Las Vegas
In Vegas you gotta know where to place your bets, and Steve Wynn is nothing if not expert at picking winners. So when the uber-developer set out to create some visual splash at his new Wynn Las Vegas — the only casino resort to earn both Mobil Five Star and AAA Five Diamond awards for 2007 — he hit the talent jackpot.
Wynn’s superstar team included Lake of Dreams creative director and renowned dancer and choreographer Kenny Ortega, high-wattage Rolling Stones lighting designer Patrick Woodroffe, Cirque du Soleil and Broadway puppet artist Michael Curry, and the white-hot Hollywood and New York agency Imaginary Forces.
Karin Fong working at her desk at Imaginary Forces’ New York office.
Imaginary Forces is an entertainment and design firm known for its award-winning work in feature films (the much-lauded main titles for “Spider-Man” and “Seven” as well as the nifty prevision sequences in “Minority Report”), advertising (spots for Nike, Kodak, Herman Miller), TV network marketing (campaigns for HBO’s “Angels in America” and “Band of Brothers”) — and what’s known as “experience design” (live events such as the Wynn project).
Though their experience designs are multimedia extravaganzas, the people at Imaginary Forces tend to simply call them visual storytelling. To craft their Scheherazade-worthy scenarios, they rely on a boatload of Macs, Final Cut Studio, After Effects and Adobe Creative Suite.
High Tech Lake
In Vegas it’s all about the razzle-dazzle, so for Steve Wynn it wasn’t enough to build a beautiful half-acre lake around which his resort’s handful of posh restaurants are clustered. To enchant his guests as they dine, Wynn turned the Lake of Dreams into a high tech theater with revolving shows.
The lake theater sports a 45x90-foot waterfall with a circular 27-foot diameter “moon screen” which rises behind it, and on which images are projected; a pair of six-axis, 25-foot robotic arms accurate in movement to 1/16th of an inch that control puppets and other props and are programmable (with 100% accuracy) with moves specific to each show; a 24-foot high 3D human “muse head” which comes out of the lake, and on which images are also projected; and some 4,500 lights that can be intricately choreographed above, below and around the water.
As Imaginary Forces founding member and director Karin Fong puts it, “Steve wanted to create a captivating pause to amuse the guests during dinner. Working with him and his Lake team, the idea was to turn those brief amusements into a new art form — sort of an environmental dinner theater.”
Each night when the sun goes down, the two- to three-minute themed shows play in 30-minute rotation. They’re vivid, sensual fantasies of color, light and music that make dramatic use of dance, puppetry, sculpture and video.
Growling and Slithering
Says Fong, “Our themes deal with the passion and attraction of male and female. The fountain lights go down, the music pumps up, and these surreal, beautiful stories come to life on multiple surfaces, in gorgeous film-grade resolution.”
Take “Jungle Bill,” set to a Yello song of the same name. As Fong describes it, “The muse opens her eyes and she’s in this surreal jungle. She’s growling and lip-syncing lines from the song. A beautiful girl, covered in body paint, rises from the lake to a tom-tom beat. She crawls and slithers around this hyper-Rousseau-stylized space of trees, flowers, colors — it’s part Brazil and part Africa, a mix of visual languages. Then there’s two 45-foot voodoo puppets that come out of the waterfall. It’s tribal,” she says, laughing, “and sooo Vegas.”
Making “Jungle Bill”
Working from Ortega’s overall show treatment, which included the song “Jungle Bill” and a general theme, Fong and her team studied the music, decided what they wanted the visuals to focus on, brainstormed images in books, films, and online, wrote a loose narrative, then created a storyboard in Photoshop and Illustrator. Ortega designed the live dancer’s moves. Fong and her editor then timed-out the storyboard frames in Final Cut Pro to see how the images were coming together in relation to the song.
“We showed that preliminary Final Cut Pro edit to Steve [Wynn],” says Fong, “to make sure we were on track.” They then mapped out the lighting, working with Woodroffe and Curry. IF and Ortega cast and rehearsed the dancer and shot the video.
Then, says Fong, “the fun begins.” Her team brought the video into After Effects, keyed out the dancer and began placing her in various environments. “We put different camera moves on her, integrated her with animated images like flowers, multiplied her, turned her into a silhouette, did a close-up on the moon screen.”
Gallery
The “Lake of Dreams” theater set-up.
An environment scene for “Jungle Bill,” one of five shows co-created by Imaginary Forces and directed by Karin Fong playing at the Wynn Las Vegas “Lake of Dreams.” Photographer: Barbara Kraft.
One of the stop-motion monsters from Chittenden “A Perfect Fit.”
The head model used in production of the commercial for Chittenden Bank, “Where does music come from?”
A scene from “Jungle Bill,” now playing at the Wynn Las Vegas “Lake of Dreams.” Photographer: Barbara Kraft.
The handmade model for the stork character in Chittenden Bank “A Perfect Fit.”
