FLIPPER’S ROLLER BOOGIE PALACE

LONDON / UK EMEA

A slice of late 1970s California is brought to Europe as a state-of-the-art indoor roller rink opens in London thanks to the vision of Nvisible Agency, with visual integration completed by Creative Technology Systems Integration.

Co-founded by Creative Director Liberty Ross and American entrepreneur Kevin Wall, Flipper’s Roller Boogie Palace is a new 34,000 sq ft entertainment destination which features a roller rink, pro skate shop, restaurant, two bars, and the ability to host live music events.

Fresh off the back of a summer-long revival with an outside rink at the Rockerfeller Center in New York City, Flipper’s new home in the English capital opened in November 2022 and hosts a range of public and private events, all made possible by a large influx of high-grade technology.

The original Flipper’s venue was a well-known Los Angeles hotspot which operated for a three-year period from 1979 when Ross’ father, Ian, opened the club in West Hollywood. Now, Liberty and her partners, which includes husband Jimmy Iovine and rapper Usher, have revived the spirit of Flipper’s for the skate enthusiasts of London.

Flipper’s has taken over Exhibition London, a Grade II listed building which was built in 1899 for Central London Railways and retains its period design features such as the tiled interior walls and huge arch windows.

Spanning two floors, the ground level features the restaurant and skate shop while the first floor is where punters get their skates on. After Flipper’s secured the building on a five-year lease, Nvisible Agency was asked to design the skate-specific aspects of the venue.

Nvisible Agency Chairman Harvey Goldsmith was contacted by Kevin Wall and the wheels were set in motion, with Tim Dunn, Nvisible’s Production Design Director, tasked with outlining the venue’s look and feel, working alongside Jim Baggott, Production Director, who was in charge of production. “The brief was to create something that was fresh, utilised state-of-the-art technology and kept the venue in-line with the present skating scene, which has its roots fixed in hip-hop and urban culture,” explained Dunn. “We made numerous site visits to get an understanding of how we’d want the venue to look and then did some renders of layouts, and they were approved.”

Design studio 93ft was contracted by Flipper’s to construct the space to Nvisible Agency’s specification, including a floating timber flooring system for the rink, which complied with the landlord’s requirement that it was not bonded to the concrete floor.

The rink was supplied by Danish floor specialist Junckers, and the distinctive black finish, achieved using stained beech, was a design element Ross insisted on. A mezzanine bar was also built to act as a viewing deck or private lounge, giving an elevated view of the skaters on the rink. Exhibition London had previously been renovated by Broadwick Live to serve as a multipurpose venue capable of hosting a variety of events, and when Flipper’s took on the lease, there was an incumbent L-Acoustics K2 sound system adorning a stage at one end of the upper floor, with two DiGiCo SD12 consoles, and a range of lighting fixtures. To get the lighting to his liking, Dunn redesigned the rig and then oversaw a huge rigging install alongside Outback and TSG, which supplied the rigging equipment. The moving heads, which were then arranged on the new rig, are a selection of Robe Divine 160, Spiider and Robin Esprite units, Prolights Mini Profile, StudioCOB and SUNRISE 4 units, and GLP JDC1 strobes. These are controlled by an MA Lighting grandMA3 light.

“We added Lucenti Pixel Bar video strips to the lighting rig, taking the rig that was already there and redesigning it to suit the distribution of the units, so it is a completely new design but with no need to add any more units – apart from the video strips,” said Dunn.

Complementing the LED strips are large visual elements on either side of the room. On one side there are four Absen K3 Plus 4.5m by 3.5m LED screens, and on the opposite side five Epson EB-PU2220B projectors point at custom- designed ShowTex roller blinds. Both the screens and blinds are positioned in front of the huge windows, with the blinds retractable to let in natural light when necessary.

“I didn’t want to permanently cover the windows because they are such a great feature of the room,” said Dunn.

“So, I designed a canvas for each window using ShowTex roller blinds fitted with a special fabric made by CarbonBlack Technology. It was the first time this fabric, which has carbon fibre woven into it, has been utilised on a roller blind for this purpose. The fabric gives a very high contrast to absorb ambient light, and they make the projections stand out and match the LED screens on the opposite side of the room.”

Dunn, along with colleague Jim Baggott, drew on the expertise of Digital Insanity founder, Richard Bagshaw, and Nigel Sadler, Special Projects Director at Green Hippo, to implement a way of driving content to the screens and projectors, utilising two Green Hippo Boreal+ MK2 media servers. “The Hippotizer media servers powers the video content across the venue – both from the projectors and the LED screens – and also the strips on the rig above the rink, which are designed as chevrons. They are positioned at such a height so that they are in the skater’s peripheral vision, making them visible along with the projections or LED screens, depending on where they are in the rink.”

Creative Technology Systems Integration was contracted by

Nvisible Agency to supply, install and integrate the screens and projectors into the venue. Leading the team was Keith Crouch, Systems Integration Commissioning Manager, with Will Harkin involved in the initial system design, working closely with Dunn.

“During the install phase, and in pre-commissioning, my job is to make sure everything is linked, that all the pieces work, and then all the training is completed so that the client is happy,” said Crouch, who noted some tricky obstacles that they had to overcome during the project. “There were a lot of things we were not allowed to do in the building,” he explained. “We could not fix anything to the tiled walls, so the four Absen LED screens are floor-standing on custom frames that we designed. The projectors are hung from the rigging, and the roller shutters that come down over the windows are hung from the building’s metalwork, and not attached to the walls.”

Another thing Crouch encountered and needed to work with – and around in some cases – was the building’s wiring. “It was already wired for video, data and fibre as a temporary events space, so we had to integrate, using that existing wiring as best we could,” he explained. “There were a few compromises made, but it worked out well, and most of the things were where we would have liked them to be.”

When it came to choosing the screens and projection solutions, Crouch had no doubts that Absen and Epson

Technical Information

VISUAL

5 x Epson EB-PU2220B projectors with ELPLU04 lenses, 4 x Absen K3 Plus 4.5m x 3.5m LED screens, 6 x Absen K2.5 Plus LED screens (various sizes), 1 x NovaStar MCTRL4K processor, 8 x NovaStar MCTRL600 processor, 2 x Green Hippo Hippotizer Boreal+ MK2, 4 x Datapath FX4-SDI, 2 x Kramer VM-4H2, 1 x Crestron CP3

LIGHTING

40 x Robe Divine 160, 30 x Robe Spiider, 24 x Robe Robin Esprite, 10 x GLP JDC1 Strobe, 4 x Prolights EclipseFS, 9 x Prolights Mini Profile, 8 x Prolights StudioCOB, 6 x Prolights SUNRISE4, 1 x MA Lighting grandMA3

AUDIO

18 x L-Acoustics K2 , 10 x L-Acoustics KS28, 5 x L-Acoustics A10, 2 x L-Acoustics A15, 2 x L-Acoustics KS21, 4 x L-Acoustics A15, 2 x DiGiCo SD12 www.flippers.world www.nvisibleagency.com www.ct-group.com/si would be more than capable of making the desired impact. “A major plus point for Absen was that their product comes in a wide array of shapes and sizes, so we knew we would find solutions, both for the four larger screens upstairs and the other locations, including the main entrance, ground floor and mezzanine bars, the pivoting doors on the skate shop,” said Crouch.

“For projector options, Epson was one of the only companies with a small form factor with high brightness option in its range and, like the Absen screens, they are really good value, high quality pieces of equipment. We have to always look at the costs, because different clients don’t always work to the same budgets – particularly for a permanent installation as opposed to a live event.”

Five NovaStar MCTRL600 controllers are positioned remotely in the venue to control the larger LED screens and three are situated in the rack alongside a main MCTRL4K LED controller, while Crestron CP3 control software presents an easy-to-use interface for venue staff to perform basic functions and operate presets.

“There is a lot of serious innovation and technology in this venue,” concluded Dunn. “The whole project started with Nvisible Agency and the team of Directors at Flipper’s, and the technical delivery team, including the Creative Technology team, that put it together was crucial to making this venue the success that it is.”