Beaucoup fun!
The first of a new type of project: Conceive, perform, design and deploy 6 tracks for a fashion show to cover 6 eras of McLaren's heritage while celebrating the design innovation of 46 Central St Martin's students.
The tracks need to be flexible enough to cater for variations in model walking speed, energetic enough to keep excitement high, varied enough that each era felt that it had its own identity, but consistent enough to feel that they all belonged together.
The 6 Tracks became :
Grease Monkey
70s Film
Neon Rain
80s Film
With The Mob
90s FIlm
Take This Mind of Mine
00-10s FIlm
Now I See You
Papaya Era Film
Eyes Closed
Finale
For the show itself first I had to create the tracks - channelling the energies of the eras. So I worked with the team to find the expressions they preferred for each decade - rocky for the 70s, synthy for the 80s, hip-hoppy for the 90s, drum 'n' bassy for the 00-10s and EDM thereafter.
There were some unique requirements as well - keep the energy up, and make sure that if a model walked slowly that the music didn't run out, transitions were always smooth and there needed to be a contigency in case we had to keep going in an era for whatever reason.
There was archive footage running throughout so it would be good to align with that, and we designed the sonic part of the experience so that the feeling of being trackside or in the pits came through as an immersive 16 channel opportunity to put visitors in the centre of the action.
Then there were the other zones of the building to consider, The Spine where the cars and designers would congregate around memorabilia and the cars that raced in those eras, and Corridors where we could pull people along a line to the Boulevard where the show was taking place. In all about half a kilometer to cover. Guests were to congregate in the Spine for about an hour after the show. So we designated a speaker per era so we could keep the thread from the show going in the respective zone of the Spine next to the designers who were on hand to talk about their work. By keeping the sound local to the cars and eras it didn't have to play too loud which meant that you avoid the spiral where loud music encourages louder talking, which in turn means everyone has a hard time hearing each other and the music gets drowned out anyway.
It's a unique building with long stretches of corridor, if we could animate those sonically and pull people through them it would give them a life they don't nornally have.
So we came up with a strategy : a 'Papaya Line' - that is the bed that bathes each zone in default warmth, that included ambiences from the show and race environments like crowd and pits as fragments so it wasn't too static and spa-like. I did a couple of variations - for the the corridor that resmbles a chicane I started to step it up with more animated pulses to announce that we were entering the final threshold - the trophy corridor - before the show by pulling people upwards as it is on a slight incline.
It was great to sonically dress the whole building and be able to work with the archivists, designers, carpenters and technicians to coordinate a truly special and unique experience that unfolded over about half a kilometer and several hours.