Tom HallLUCID activated two compelling constructions over one weekend at Parklife and Field Day.
LUCID at Field Day Festival 2019
Kent and London-based design and fabrication company LUCID worked closely with Outer Insight agency to realise and build an immersive BULLDOG Gin brand activation (pictured above) for festival revellers at this year’s Field Day festival.
The immersive branded arena, built using sea containers, housed a bar, an interactive immersive experience, a DJ platform, VIP viewing platform and seating area. The likes of Denis Sulta, DJ Haii and many more brought epic dance music to the arena which was packed by close on Saturday evening.
Helen Swan and Chris Carr, co-directors of LUCID, and their team create and build structures and spaces designed for immersion. “Global and Field Day asked us to come up with a design for their fourth stage, in collaboration with BULLDOG Gin. It needed to complement and incorporate Bulldog’s strong brand identity without feeling like a brand activation that had been crowbarred onto site,” explains Swan. The BULLDOG Gin Yard arena was created by layered black shipping containers highlighted with the minimalist BULLDOG logo.
It was not without its creative challenges. Helen explains: “Field Day’s audiences are super-media savvy and it was imperative that the design we created had authenticity as an arena and stage in its own right and didn’t feel like a brand activation. By working with the minimalism of the BULLDOG logo combined with black shipping containers which echoed the industrial nature of the Field Day site, we created a space that had it own identity beyond the brand without losing the brand awareness.”
Creative inspiration was drawn from the raw industrial interior of the Drum Sheds and its surroundings on the Field Day festival site in Meridian Water, North London. Swan says: “We love how Broadwick Live have retained the original features of the warehouses and used similar materials that reflected the original use of the Drum Sheds and the Field Day site to create the BULLDOG Gin Yard.”
“The feedback we received was overwhelming. It was raving all weekend and the DJs loved the booth overlooking the arena. BULLDOG, Global and Field Day all loved the arena and BULLDOG will now continue to use that container bar at a number of forthcoming events,” says Swan.
LUCID build ‘The Valley’ at Parklife Festival
LUCID returned for a second year to design and build the iconic The Valley (pictured below) at Parklife Festival 2019. Four times the size of the previous year, the fabrication company used innovative engineering and design techniques to build the dystopian cityscape structure by building in a modular way so that the stages could be built quickly on site and can be reused year after year. This year’s line up on The Valley, hosted by Disclosure, included the likes of Nas, Mark Ronson, Kaytranada, Annie Mac, Denis Sulta, DJ Koze, Honey Dijon and Sally C.
Parklife asked LUCID to design and build an iconic new stage with integrated lighting and video. The Valley was a life-size tower block complex influenced by brutalist architecture and dystopian fiction, consisting of the 100m wide by 22m high stage, a 50m brutalist bar and a two-storey Pepsi factory doubling as a viewing platform.
Every window in the eight life-size tower blocks that make up the cityscape of the stage is an LED screen featuring moving silhouettes of the people living in the towers whilst the billboard screens continuously show futuristic public service announcements and adverts.
LUCID designed and created every inch of the set, from developing an eight-layer process to turn ply flats into hyper-realistic aged concrete, to making and programming the on-screen content and LED lighting. All three of the structures comprising The Valley had to be constructed onsite at the Parklife festival grounds within 10 days. This included leaving enough time for Disclosure to run through their programming with LUCID’s lighting design team. LUCID developed a modular frame and bracket system that allowed them to get set up at height, with speed, and without crane lifts where none were available.
