Imaginary Forces

Wynn Las Vegas: Lake of Dreams

Creating a showstopper in Las Vegas is harder than beating the house. Karin Fong, creative director of entertainment and design studio Imaginary Forces, deconstructs her team's new multimedia show. Oh yeah!

"Steve Wynn is the innovator behind Las Vegas spectacle as we know it today. Thousands of people see his creations daily, such as the Bellagio's choreographed fountains. With Lake of Dreams, he wanted something distinct, so he created a multimedia theater that could host a variety of shows. The first thing we do as we develop a new show with him is discuss music ideas. We'll all bring in songs to listen to together. "The images have to hear the music" is something Mr. Wynn says all the time. So the songs we pick need to be extremely dynamic and have dramatic transitions. One tune that stood out was 'Oh Yeah,' by Yello, which was made famous in the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off."
BLANK SLATE > the theater

"The lake theater has this operatic quality to it, and to that we add digital projections, puppetry, lighting, and music. In addition, a 25-foot "muse head" can emerge from the water, and you can project images on it. After listening to the varied sounds in "Oh Yeah," we realized they would translate well to a cast of changing, abstract characters mouthing all the words, exclusively on the muse head."

INSPIRATION > art and video

"We remembered that we've always talked about doing something like that great Peter Gabriel video for 'Sledge hammer,' with its stop-motion animation. We also took cues from fine art and Steve Wynn's art collection is legendary. For the faces, we were inspired by work from Arcimboldo, Paul Klee, Picasso, and other modern artists."

SKETCHES > facial features

"I first thought of the head almost like an elaborate Mr. Potato Head that constantly changes, and my earliest sketches fooled around with the facial features. I also did some watercolor sketches on a photograph of the muse head. Each designer on the team was encouraged to sketch faces in experimental ways."

"Before this show, the muse head was always portrayed photographically, literally as the face of a beautiful muse. So on of the challenges was to work with this very constant human-head shape but give it a more illustrative look. Using clay helped us manipulate the fixed 3-D facial features and add even more texure and dimension. We even created a character made partly from orange clay, which mouths the 'chicka-chicka' part of the song."

FINAL VIDEO > stills

"Our team of animators and designers worked on computers and by hand to collage together the faces using stop-motion animation and illustration techniques. The characters' actions are completely synchronized to the music, which is what keeps the face and the environment alive."

PRODUCTION > live models

"I decide to use real people as the base layer of the sequence so we would have a variety of actual expressions and to make sure we'd end up with a realistic lip sync. We cast specifically for people who had a range of quirky facial expressions, people who were not only uninhibited but, this was the kicker who could hold their face perfectly still while they were singing, laughing, and sticking out their tongues! At the casting callbacks, there was a quarter-size image of the head where we could immediately project the performer's face to make sure it fit."

"The last part of the process involved choreographing the water and the lights as well as rehearsing the animatronics by raising and lowering the head. For this show, we found that the most stunning effect came from keeping the lighting subdued. That way, the muse head rises slowly from the lake, and the entire 'Oh Yeah' show is featured dramatically against the water."