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FKJ @ THE ROUNDHOUSE Production Designer Stu Dingley creates a multimedia masterpiece with projection and lighting for multi-instrumentalist, French Kiwi Juice (FKJ).
Known for his elegant loungy music and funky visuals, French musician FKJ self-titled debut album French Kiwi Juice released in 2017 soon racked up millions Spotify plays and sold out shows across the globe. For his latest Roundhouse performance in London he joined forces with Production Designer, Stu Dingley, who fused projection and lighting to generate a show full of shadows and silhouettes to balance artfully in juxtaposition with the video content. In the initial chats between Vincent Fenton, (aka FKJ) and Dingley at the start of the design process, video content was always a priority. As a keen videographer with terabytes of content available, FKJ really wanted to have certain elements streamed within his performance. To showcase the content, Dingley opted to utilise some tasteful projection. Dingley sourced a selection of fabrics from ShowTex which were sent to LA where they built scale models and looked at how the projected images appeared. These were recorded and sent to FKJ – who was in Asia at the time – for approval, and from this they chose the best fabric for
the application. The designer opted for ShowTex transparent silk drapes downstage for the main projections. Dingley reflected: “We wanted to stay away from white material as the concept was the screens appear and disappear in the dark without being noticed. We tried some metallic holo gauze type stuff, but it was very fragile and wouldn’t have lasted a tour especially being rolled up and deployed at speed. We ended up settling on their Voile CS fabric. It was the perfect balance between transparency and reflectiveness.” He went on to praise the projection surface. “ShowTex have been superb with helping us on this project. They sent us a handful of different materials out to LA and we built some scale models to test with an office projector and some art mannequins. The drapes were controlled by three 10ft Wahlberg Mini Roll Down rollers via DMX automation. “The rollers are an absolutely fantastic product. We built a custom profile for them on the MA2, each day you set the physical high and low holding flash buttons for a couple of seconds and
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