Garth Hemphill is a translator of an owner’s dream for a facility into audio and video design reality. This skill is part of what makes him fit in so well at Schuler Shook. As we welcome Garth, we have invited him to share some of his thoughts and experiences to help you get to know him, too. We decided to start this series with listening – the same place we start our work.
GH: I encourage owners and architects of the facilities we are helping create to let me hear the vision – the whole vision – everything! In the earliest days, sometimes before there’s an actual project, give every idea room to breathe. Sometimes, people self-edit and censor their ideas. This is especially so when talking about multiple ideas that are seemingly in direct conflict with each other. If you don’t think something is possible, or maybe not possible within your budget, you might choose to say nothing. I recommend doing the opposite. This is the moment when you need to dream big. Tell your designers what you need, what you want, and what you wish could happen. Let us see if we can help, because helping you achieve your goals is a huge motivator for us.
This is not the time to wonder how something can be done. That time comes soon enough in the process, but in those early conversations and first meetings, tell us about your dream of having the interior walls of your theatre come to life. Tell us about how you want the stage scenery to immerse the audience and envelop them in the world you are creating in that moment, and then change to something else completely. Those nearly off-the-cuff comments can spur our most creative solutions for you.
“I don’t like the way projection screens look hanging in the theatre, but I guess we have to have them.”
“Actually, you don’t. What if you could project on the walls, and maybe the ceiling too?”
“But those projectors are so big and noisy. That won’t work.”
“Let me think about that, and let’s talk again later.”
It was a conversation like this during the design of a large performing arts center that led to a conversation with a projector manufacturer. That conversation – and some collaboration – led to a successful solution – bright, quiet projection capability. The solution meant the creation of a new innovative product line with effectively bright, high-resolution projectors that have remote light engines. The projection head in the room is a 16” cube with a nearly silent fan. That cube can project 40,000 lumens of light at 4K – and soon 8K – resolutions so that you can cover those large walls with whatever your imagination dreams up.
We spend a lot of time and energy working with manufacturers to create the new products that we need to bring your vision to life. They aren’t always as magical as the projector example. Sometimes the answer is simpler. Maybe it is a smaller version of a loudspeaker to fit in the front of a stage, or a ruggedized version of a network video encoder with professional AV connections that is designed to handle the abuse of a production environment and still deliver 4K uncompressed video across the network in under 1 millisecond.
So tell us all your ideas. Don’t censor yourself. This is your time to dream. Let us try to make it come true.