RADIO CITY CHRISTMAS

In mid-August, summer was still in full swing in Chicago, but a walk through Chicago Scenic's shop looked more like a scene from Santa's Workshop.

Nearly every Chicago Scenic department was working in full Christmas mode in order to complete the scenery updates and changes that Radio City's Designer Pat Fahey and Technical Director Larry Morley had in mind for this year's Christmas Spectacular Show, recalls Ken Zommer, the senior project manager for the Radio City project.

This year's updates included changes to some of the Show's favorite scenes, including Santa's Workshop, which took on a "steampunk" theme, featuring rotating gears and pumping pistons reminiscent of 19th century steam power equipment.

Two prominent Workshop elements, the "Workshop Portal" and the Workshop interior, received updates, Zommer said. The "Portal" consists of an aluminum tube frame with painted profile cutouts applied to its face. Red and green lights decorate the façade of this enormous scenic element, which measures 80-feet-wide by 43-feet-high.

"The thing that makes this job so fun is the scale," Zommer said. "It's so much larger than life. Typically, pieces would be 30 to 40-feet-wide, but for Radio City the pieces are all 60 to 80 feet wide. They're just plain big."

The Workshop interior features a gigantic "Gift Spinner", a spinning vertical wheel that rotates while on-stage dancers toss brightly wrapped gifts through the spinner. The Gift Spinner is brightly decorated with holiday lights, and colored smoke puffs up periodically, adding to its mystique.

This year, Santa's workshop also features a motorized train that Chicago Scenic contracted, customized, and engineered with Bellatori Family Train, a Bethlehem, GA firm that specializes in trackless trains. "Everything you want in an interior mall train, they've got," said Zommer.

Using Fahey's intricate designs, Chicago Scenic's artists painted the train's engine, three custom flatbed cars, and caboose exteriors. Special touches included decorative rivets, frosted acrylic windows, illuminating lanterns, a festive bell that announces the train's presence onstage, and a tiny red Santa hat on the engine's "bronze" eagle.

The New York Department store always plays a key role in the Radio City Christmas Show and the Store's Exterior and Interior were both redesigned this year. The Store Exterior now features 45-foot-tall columns wrapped with faux greenery and a façade festooned with bright holiday lights. A 12-foot diameter evergreen wreath hangs above the store entrance.

The Store Interior features an unforgettable combination of iconic holiday elements, including a 17-foot-tall inflatable Teddy Bear. Big Air Productions, located just outside of Seattle, WA, supplied the inflatable bear body while Chicago Scenic employees sewed and stuffed its custom head and created the custom lift mechanism that raised the Bear into the air behind Santa's throne.

The dark green throne, an eight-foot-tall chair, was custom built, upholstered and painted in Chicago Scenic's shop; a red and gold banner with an appliquéd "S" adorns the throne. Two faux Christmas trees, decorated with gold ornaments, and flats of painted gifts complete the Workshop's interior décor.

After nearly two months of non-stop activity, all signs of the holiday show were gone from Chicago Scenic's shop floor before Halloween arrived, shipped off to New York for a month of set up and rehearsals before the first show opened on November 11.

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Leo Burnett Breakfast Features Live Sports Event Broadcast with Greg Gumbel

Every December, Chicago advertising agency Leo Burnett hosts its employee breakfast, reviewing its past year's business and rewarding its employees for their outstanding creative work. Themes vary each year; this year's was "The Apple Bowl", featuring a "live" sports broadcast that included television sportscaster Greg Gumbel and "Sports Action Team", a local comedy team, as the broadcast talent.

The event was held at Soldier Field's Stadium Club which accommodated more than 1200 Leo Burnett employees. Gary Heitz, one of Chicago Scenic's senior project managers, supervised this year's event as he has for the last 20 years. Working with Tim Johnson, Burnett's director of Agency Infrastructure, Heitz developed a floor plan that would accommodate the crowd, a challenge since the Stadium Club is 250-feet wide but only 48-feet deep.

The eventual solution, Heitz said, was to lay out the room with theater seating in four different sections; each section featured a prominent video screen for maximum audience visibility. Since the breakfast concept featured the "live" sports broadcast, the broadcast set and control board were placed in the midst of the crowd. Tony Rogers, a Leo Burnett designer, developed the concept of the live broadcast show with fellow creative Matt Denten.

In additional to providing project management and the set backdrops, Chicago Scenic customized one of its rental anchor desks and managed the various contractors and labor service providers required for the event.

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McDonald's Fry Lights Shine

Chicago residents who had a mysterious craving for french fries recently were probably responding to McDonald's new downtown billboard which featured a set of high-intensity spotlights that created a super super-sized nighttime version of its popular french fry treat. The billboard was part of the fast food restaurant's regional "best fries on the planet" campaign.

Chicago Scenic worked with McDonald's agency Leo Burnett to develop the fry lights illusion which debuted on "Fryday", 11.11.11. The iconic red McDonald's French fry box was created by the billboard company and featured a custom, curved header attached to the top of the billboard that made it resemble a gigantic, 36-foot-wide fry box. Metro Media Technologies created the billboard's electro-luminescent panels that Chicago Scenic's team installed. Those panels illuminated the translucent fry box graphics, eliminating front illumination which would have washed out the golden fry lights that shot high into the night sky.