Martin’s intuitive pixel-map platform drives huge investment in MAC and VDO fixtures
Since COVID changed the corporate event landscape—and clients started seeking ever more creative production ideas to boost their presentations—Static Lighting Company (SLC) has turned increasingly to Martin lighting solutions to meet its challenges.
Last year alone the company invested £1m in inventory upgrades to remain at the cutting edge, and half of that was in Martin Professional via UK distributor, Sound Technology Ltd.
Now with over 1000 Martin fixtures in their inventory (including MAC Aura PXL, MAC Aura XIP, MAC Ultra and VDO Sceptron 10mm pixel pitch linear battens) their goal has been to make its entire fleet compatible with Martin’s P3 video system control protocol.
In the converging worlds of lighting and video this offers an elegant solution for mapping creative LED and lighting content including manipulation of the video such as scaling, rotating, mirroring and more. This ‘eco system’ has huge efficiency advantages over conventional protocols such as DMX, Art-Net or sACN, as fixtures can be kept in a low channel-count mode on the DMX controller and complete video mapping integration can be achieved from the video input to the P3 without requiring endless DMX universes, nodes and licences. In addition to the fixtures in SLC’s fleet, other P3-equipped Martin fixtures include the VDO Atomic Dot, VDO Atomic Bold and VDO Fatron.
Set up in the year 2000 by Andy Mama, SLC immediately broke into the demanding motor show exhibition market via leading production companies like Imagination and Jack Morton—a fiercely competitive sector, notable for its use of innovative technology. SLC has helped its clients keep ahead of the game and today, according to senior account manager, Mark Draper, they can do that by standardising on P3-enabled fixtures.
“We upgraded our fleet last year, and disposed of [another brand] because it was not as popular and replaced it with Martin equipment—a mix of both MAC Aura PXL and XIP, and Sceptron. MAC Aura XIP we purchased because we had such a large fleet of Aura XB—over 500 fixtures—that we wanted to be a part of the next generation and that’s worked out extremely well. So we’ve started to sell our Aura XB kit off and we’ll continue to replace it with XIP’s as we go along.”
Shipping to events across the globe from further bases in China (the wholly owned SLC Asia) and North America (via Christie Lites), the company is a deceptively large operation, having blindsided many of its competitors. Events in which they specialise range from car shows (although the number has diminished considerably in Europe and North America) to fashion shows, esports and gaming exhibitions.
“We’re almost a stealth company because not many know we exist,” admits Draper. “We’ve come out of the shadows a bit in the last few years and opened up our stock to dry hire which we never did before. It did cause a bit of a shock when we came out of lockdown and announced ourselves to the world.”
Initially it was the multi-functionality of the Martin MAC series—Aura XB, Viper Wash and Performance—that attracted them. But when P3 was announced in 2009 SLC were soon on board. “We bought into P3 a long time ago purely because we had a client that required a simple set up. What’s interesting now is that it gives us a completely new dimension in creativity that answers problems we didn’t even know we had.”
In particular P3 has shown its worth since car shows have started to reduce in capacity in favour of more bespoke events, with fewer cars and a restricted audience.
Mark Draper, Static Light Company
MAC Aura PXL and Sceptron had been purchased for specific projects that require the P3 protocol. “The PXL’s are a good example of a particular client that’s very video orientated; they do a lot of work for Intel and they created what was known as the Intel Wonderwall.” This was a massive intelligent LED screen which first appears in 2017 when Mark was with another company.
“I put in a 25m x 5m LED video screen but what was clever was it was an interactive piece of software so it was live rendered video content with which people interacted in front of the screen. I knew if I was to work for a lighting company again I would try and do something more interesting than what happened before. When I came here Andy [Mama] put his money where my mouth was and purchased PXL’s. We were able to take the content that was running on the screen and interact with the people in front of it, and it allowed us to pump that through the P3 protocol and then put that into the lighting rig.
“We used it in a slightly different way, so instead of a video screen with lighting round it, our lighting was separate from the screen—we used it to project the colours that were on the screen onto the exhibition stand so it spread the light effect much further across the stand and gave a whole different feeling to the floor, making it a much bigger canvas.
“We also used the [VDO] Sceptron as well to give an effect across the whole stand. The client has got every excited about the whole P3 protocol because we were using it in a completely different way; instead of mirroring the screen to extend the size of it— which the P3 was designed to do—we’ve used the protocol almost as a stand-alone element.”
SLC took the concept a stage further, also working for the same design agency, 2LK, at the International Casino Exhibition (ICE 2024). “The client’s logo was a triangle—in blue and white—and they wanted to have pixel control over the triangles, so they came to us.” The grid of triangles was constructed out of VDO Sceptron and MAC Aura XIPs, controlled via a pair of Martin P3-200 system controllers, with the design masterminded by SLC’s Sam Thomas.
“Originally, they had a complicated DMX set up and we said you don’t have to do that you can just use P3. What was fascinating was they couldn’t get their heads around just how simple it was until they saw it. We were looking at hundreds of universes of pixel control and instead we just did it with P3. When we got to site I said [to the content creator] upload your video and I’ll show you how to do it. He said, ‘so literally whatever’s on that video comes out there’ and I said ‘yes, exactly … it’s no different to a TV screen, you just map it out’.
“We produced a custom bracket solution so all the triangles were perfect. We were able to push a load of video through it and it looked stunning. And when the client decided he wanted to jazz it up a bit, we simply had the video adjusted, uploaded it and away we went. What would have taken hours and hours of programming overnight was just a ten minute upload and there it was.”
Again it was a classic example of using P3 in a unique way from how it was intended—since there was no video interface. “There was a video screen on the stand but that was showing different content, using video to control a lighting pattern in a completely separate way.
“The P3 protocol was working with Sceptron and XIP’s, and as the video running across was changing so it projected the colours of the video onto the ground; you had a ceiling that was changing colour and an exhibition stand underneath that was doing the same.”
P3 was developed to work in conjunction with the video on a show, but without a screen the lighting effectively becomes the screen… so it’s a case of blurring those lines,” he explains.
“In another job we’ve created a Sceptron tunnel and lo-res video going through it to give a sense of motion. The car’s not moving but the tunnel is, and again it’s using the P3 in an entirely different way. It’s purely lighting—not lighting and video—and just using video to run the protocol.
“It’s fun to do things differently,” he summarises. “To try and stand out these days is quite hard and with P3 and the power of the Martin fixtures we are achieving it very well. You can see it from a long way away; it changes the visual effect on the whole stand and works particularly well for dynamic shapes and amorphous content.
“Has it made us more creative? 100%!” concludes Mark Draper. “It gives us new options we’ve never had before; because of the sheer speed of it, you can do things that would take you days if not weeks of pre-programming to do—you just plug the USB in and upload the video… thanks very much!”
