Butterfly effect
Dominic Harris and his team at Cinimod Studio are at it again, reinforcing a restaurant chain’s brand identity with dynamic and innovative lighting
If you were approached by the man behind Pret A Manger to help establish the brand identity of your latest retail food business, you’d take notice.
That’s what happened to Dominic Harris, the creative director at Snog frozen yoghurt chain.
Itsu has, in fact, been running for several years, and has a number of upmarket Asian restaurants dotted around the capital. “The restaurants have a strong visual identity already,” says Harris, “but they wanted to introduce something eye-catching and they approached us with a brief to create something specifically for the Fleet Street shop initially but with a view to incorporating it in other new stores or retrofitting to existing stores.”
The result is a striking lighting feature that emulates the flight of a butterfly using little more that some acrylic panels and animated light.
An open brief
“The brief was very open,” says Harris. “They said they wanted something that was bright and colourful, building on the projects we’d already worked on, that would become a prominent visual element in a store. Beyond that they said: ‘Go away, and you tell us what you think we should do.’”
Cinimod returned to the client with several options, but Harris says the standout idea was a butterfly in flight – an interpretation in light of the Itsu logo. Translating the idea into reality, however, would demand some detailed design work.
“We knew we couldn’t have anything kinetic,” Harris continues, “we couldn’t have anything that was physically moving, but we really wanted to bring in the excitement of the movement of the butterfly.”
The first part of the design phase was to study video of butterflies in flight. “We noticed that iridescence makes the wing go through a whole series of colour shifts,” says Harris.
Next, using 3D software, Cinimod modelled the movements of the wing through time. “We took quite a bizarrely scientific approach to this,” says Harris. “We started slicing up the 3D model in time, and realised that we could, with a little artistry and tweaking, get these beautiful butterfly wing shapes.”
Mirrors and embedded LED lighting, cleverly controlled, create the dynamic display
Cutting edge
Those shapes would be cut from an acrylic material and arranged on a mirrored panel on the ceiling, forming a crescent-shaped procession of real and reflected wings. Cinimod generated the profiles for each wing using its software and handed them over to Vision Visual Solutions, a signmaker, for fabrication by computer numerical controlled machines.
“We needed a dense packing of LEDs because we were limiting ourselves to injecting light only from the top edge of the wing”
The material being cut was Prismex, a patented product from Lucite, the company that makes Perspex. A pattern of dots of different sizes is printed on the surface, so when the sheet is lit from an edge – by a strip of LEDs, for example – internal reflection and the surface dots create a uniform glow across the surface.
The first challenge was to inject enough light into the acrylic wings. “We needed a dense packing of LEDs because we were limiting ourselves to injecting light only from the top edge of the wing in the ceiling,” says Harris, “so the LED strips are a bespoke product made by our fabricators in China.”
Each wing is mounted in a metal laminate mirrored surface that is lighter and safer than alternatives such as solid metal or glass. The LED strips are mounted along the edge of the wing that disappears into a slot in the laminate. As a result, onlookers cannot see the light source.
A floating appearance
“We were striving to achieve the perfect marriage between the physical sculpted form – the static element – and the lighting as the active, moving element,” says Harris. “The use of materials and the finishing details give it an almost floating appearance. You just see the wings and their reflections in the mirrored ceiling.”
Harris says his background in architecture makes him “really quite pedantic about how things should be integrated and detailed”. “For me it’s not just putting up a lighting feature, but it’s also how it interfaces with everything else in the store,” he adds.
“The bit I’ve enjoyed most about it is how well it’s integrated and how right it feels when you sit in the space,” says Harris. “On the one hand it’s fighting for your visual attention, but at the same time it has that natural feeling about it and doesn’t feel like an alien object.”
Metamorphosis - Itsu's butterfly emerges
As dynamic as the Itsu sculpture is, it is truly brought to life by the animated lighting that ripples through the wings.
The display is not the same day in, day out. "Like many of our other projects, we try to vary the tempo based on the time of day and with seasonal weather shifts," says Dominic Harris.
The client has no day-to-day control of the installation, which runs its pre-programmed sequence. E-Cue control equipment and the DMX controller is squirrelled away in a service cupboard - but it is easy to reach if there is a problem. "One thing we've continued to learn through all our projects is how important it is that anything that could conceivably need to be serviced or maintained is located somewhere accessible," says Harris.
Harris and his colleagues are monitoring the installation. "We will always go back to see what the feedback is. We will continue to evolve our installations throughout their lives."
Project details
Project: Itsu, Fleet Street, London
Feature lighting designer: Cinimod Studio
Feature lighting manufacture: Vision Visual Solutions
Architect: Cada
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