Bright Lights and New Heights

Written by Steven Paschall

A Look Around a Lot of Ideas

So, you walk into a room 20-feet wide and 31-feet long, with entirely blank walls stretching 23 feet over your head. Maybe you imagine training for a world racquetball championship (hey, it’ll probably be declared an Olympic sport soon enough). Maybe you picture all of those walls covered in large-scale, abstract impressionist paintings. Or maybe, like us, you see four giant walls and think, “What if we added a fifth?”

“Cyclorama” is admittedly a fun word to say. Actually building a 14-foot, white-cove cyc wall, however, isn’t quite as quick. For one thing, wood is not exactly the biggest fan of bending. Also, hammering and sawing tend to be less musical and more messy than your average activities. And then there’s geometry. And physics. And gravity. All three of which seem a whole lot more serious when looking down from a 20-foot ladder and trying to balance a tape measure extended two or three times longer than yourself.

It didn’t take long before our voices began ricocheting and echoing throughout the space with what ifs, what abouts, possiblies and maybes. Our office dog (and chief morale officer) waltzed in, sniffed around the scene, and comfortably plopped down. We took the tacit approval of her sixth sense as a good sign.

After taking far more measurements in a single day than four out of five doctors recommend — the grand total coming in at the very precise number of a bajillion — we lied down on the cool concrete floor and just stared at the ceiling with a little glint in our eyes, and the occasional word. “Cool.” “Yeah.” “Totally."

I’m fairly certain we walked the ten seconds back to our office at a perfectly normal pace, but there’s also a good chance that it looked like we were reenacting a slow-motion, power walk scene from one of many movies. We managed to fit our heads inflated with a thousand and one ideas through the doors, sat down around the table, and collectively thought, “So now then. Where do we begin?”

We started with hand gestures. Then Post-Its. Then Google. Then got down to turning our mélange of dreams into digital dimensions with some legit 3D architecture. We’re sharpening our tools and swirling through designs for fully-equipped gear storage, hair and makeup stations, crafty setups, client lounges, light grids, color palettes, carbon-absorbing paint, murals, artwork, and our own La Storia-style je ne sais quoi.

A new chapter to our story will be out soon. Once it’s ready to read, you won’t want to leave.