Imaginary Forces

Karin Fong: Viva Las Vegas

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In Vegas you gotta know where to place your bets, and Steve Wynn is nothing if not expert at picking winners. So when the uber-developer set out to create some visual splash at his new Wynn Las Vegas, the only casino resort to earn both Mobil Five Star and AAA Five Diamond awards for 2007, he hit the talent jackpot.

Wynn's superstar team included Lake of Dreams creative director and renowned dancer and choreographer Kenny Ortega, high-wattage Rolling Stones lighting designer Patrick Woodroffe, Cirque du Soleil and Broadway puppet artist Michael Curry, and the white-hot Hollywood and New York agency Imaginary Forces.

Imaginary Forces is an entertainment and design firm known for its award-winning work in feature films (the much-lauded main titles for Spider-Man and Seven as well as the nifty prevision sequences in Minority Report), advertising (spots for Nike, Kodak, Herman Miller), TV network marketing (campaigns for HBO's Angels in America and Band of Brothers) and what's known as "experience design" (live events such as the Wynn project).

Though their experience designs are multimedia extravaganzas, the people at Imaginary Forces tend to simply call them visual storytelling. To craft their Scheherazade-worthy scenarios, they rely on a boatload of Macs, Final Cut Studio, After Effects and Adobe Creative Suite.

High Tech Lake
In Vegas it's all about the razzle-dazzle, so for Steve Wynn it wasn't enough to build a beautiful half-acre lake around which his resort's handful of posh restaurants are clustered. To enchant his guests as they dine, Wynn turned the Lake of Dreams into a high tech theater with revolving shows.

The lake theater sports a 45x90-foot waterfall with a circular 27-foot diameter "moon screen" which rises behind it, and on which images are projected; a pair of six-axis, 25-foot robotic arms accurate in movement to 1/16th of an inch that control puppets and other props and are programmable (with 100% accuracy) with moves specific to each show; a 24-foot high 3D human "muse head" which comes out of the lake, and on which images are also projected; and some 4,500 lights that can be intricately choreographed above, below and around the water.

As Imaginary Forces founding member and director Karin Fong puts it, "Steve wanted to create a captivating pause to amuse the guests during dinner. Working with him and his Lake team, the idea was to turn those brief amusements into a new art form, sort of an environmental dinner theater."

Each night when the sun goes down, the two- to three-minute themed shows play in 30-minute rotation. They're vivid, sensual fantasies of color, light and music that make dramatic use of dance, puppetry, sculpture and video.

Growling and Slithering
Says Fong, "Our themes deal with the passion and attraction of male and female. The fountain lights go down, the music pumps up, and these surreal, beautiful stories come to life on multiple surfaces, in gorgeous film-grade resolution."

Take Jungle Bill, set to a Yello song of the same name. As Fong describes it, "The muse opens her eyes and she's in this surreal jungle. She's growling and lip-syncing lines from the song. A beautiful girl, covered in body paint, rises from the lake to a tom-tom beat. She crawls and slithers around this hyper-Rousseau-stylized space of trees, flowers, colors, it's part Brazil and part Africa, a mix of visual languages. Then there's two 45-foot voodoo puppets that come out of the waterfall. It's tribal," she says, laughing, "and sooo Vegas."

Making Jungle Bill
Working from Ortega's overall show treatment, which included the song Jungle Bill and a general theme, Fong and her team studied the music, decided what they wanted the visuals to focus on, brainstormed images in books, films, and online, wrote a loose narrative, then created a storyboard in Photoshop and Illustrator. Ortega designed the live dancer's moves. Fong and her editor then timed-out the storyboard frames in Final Cut Pro to see how the images were coming together in relation to the song.

"We showed that preliminary Final Cut Pro edit to Steve [Wynn]," says Fong, "to make sure we were on track." They then mapped out the lighting, working with Woodroffe and Curry. IF and Ortega cast and rehearsed the dancer and shot the video.

Then, says Fong, "the fun begins." Her team brought the video into After Effects, keyed out the dancer and began placing her in various environments. "We put different camera moves on her, integrated her with animated images like flowers, multiplied her, turned her into a silhouette, did a close-up on the moon screen."

Three-Screen Editing
Fong and her editor coordinated the imagery among the waterfall, moon and muse head screens. "We have three projectors running off the same timecode," she explains, "and we have to time all the movements because the music drives everything."

Fong notes that her Final Cut Pro editing covers both traditional imagery and animation, such as making sure the lip syncs are correct, as well as more theatrical choreography, such as the precise timing of the muse head rising from the water, which "has to be dramatic." After editing the three tracks separately, they're combined in one comp to gauge how they interact.

"Final Cut Pro is great," enthuses Fong, "because we can edit for all three screens at once. A lot of our work is a kind of collage. We take things from different sources, like live action and digital images. Then we composite all these different mattes, keys and layers into the image. Final Cut Pro is very fluid at doing that. The ease with which Final Cut Pro lets you bring things in becomes really important to our pipeline."

Mac Is A Collage Box
"I really depend on the Mac, and all the software that�s available for it," says Fong. "The 2D and 3D animation, the storyboards, it's all on the Mac. And the way the programs work together on the Mac, so I can present my ideas visually, is totally important to me. There's nothing else like it for design."

She goes on, "I think of the Mac as a collage box. It's a wonderful place to layer things, including music." Best of all, adds Fong, she's not limited to computer-generated imagery.

"The Mac lets me scan in handmade things, like my own drawings. So I don't have to sacrifice those elements, which I love, just because I'm working on the computer. Plus, I can have this great dialog where I put something in the Mac, print it out, scan it, bring it back in, and create these layers of digital and analog. You get this really exciting mash-up. The Mac lets you travel from something you hold in your hand to this wide vista in a few seconds. It opens up all kinds of possibilities."

Surprising Twists
As a storyteller, Fong understands what keeps audiences engaged. "The most exciting thing about this kind of project," she says, "is all the opportunities for building a narrative and keeping it surprising. When there's a twist in a story, people re-experience the world they're in. And with these tools on the Mac, anything can happen."

Fong relishes the advances made possible by technology. "You start with some idea that's just chicken scratch on paper, and you can make something so memorable," she says. "And the world of filmmaking is opening up, because people are accepting, and expecting, the integration of animation and live action and type. So it's becoming a new language, and that's very exciting."

It's a tongue that Fong and her crew are continually exploring. "At first," she remarks, referring to the early stages of the Wynn project, "we were tempted to turn it all on at the same time. Then we saw that it was confusing. So we discovered how to use a series of screens to draw the viewer around the space." They built a narrative for the lakeside shows by choreographing the lighting and imagery and stage effects to guide viewers where to look next.

Flamenco and Rachmaninoff
Audiences have been blown away. Says Fong, "It's not just some ambient thing. They put down their forks and watch, which is exactly what Steve wanted. Afterward, they tell people about this crazy show they saw at Wynn, with a head that pops out of the water, or a flamenco thing with a cape and a bull, or Rachmaninoff with beautiful flowers opening up. and each person relates a different experience. The idea is to entertain people and keep them coming back."

To Fong and her team, the variety keeps the assignment fascinating. "For us," she comments, "it's like we're programming our own little channel, with all these delights and surprises. Because," she adds with a born storyteller's love of mystery, "my favorite projects are the ones where someone asks me, 'How did you do that?'"

Homespun high-design
Fong proved in a series of whimsical TV spots, made with ad agency KSV for Vermont client Chittenden Bank, that she could do off-the-shelf as well as over-the-top. "These couldn't have been more different from Wynn," says Fong. "They have this totally homespun look."

Fong's team used 3D objects, paper cutouts, collage and stop-motion photography to craft whimsical mini-stories about the bank's clients. They assembled the components by hand, painstakingly shot the stories frame by frame, then layered, blended and animated them on the Mac using After Effects, Final Cut Pro and QuickTime Pro. Bringing the digital stills into QuickTime enabled the IF team to immediately see if an idea worked, or not. "That instant feedback was great," notes Fong. "We called those digital QuickTimes our dailies."

The blend of homespun and high tech worked perfectly for Chittenden. "It was a total crossover thing," Fong comments. "We wanted a very DIY look, which we achieved by manipulating handmade things in the Mac."