Production Values Thursday, September 20, 2007 The 14-foot director’s chairs set up throughout Manhattan earlier this year weren’t designed to accommodate an oversized Steven Speilberg. They were created to generate buzz for American Express amid the annual Tribeca Film Festival—with an interactive twist. On behalf of festival sponsor AmEx, event agency Momentum hired Manhattan’s Event Resources to handle the chairs’ installation. In all, seven 14-foot-tall chairs were dispersed around New York City for a 12-day spin. The oversized chairs featured a plasma screen monitor hung off the front rail, which ran AmEx and Tribeca Film Festival promo reels. The lower third of the screen displayed text messages from people on the streets, who sent in movie reviews, screening times, and comments about the festival via their wireless phones. “It was very interactive, not just traditional street marketing,” says Tanya Greenblatt, a producer at Event Resources. Getting the necessary approvals to allow the structures to be erected on the sidewalks of Manhattan was a critical step in the process. “These structures, although they’re temporary, still need to be approved by the New York City Department of Buildings, and needed an engineer’s approval. It was amazing that it all came together considering the time,” Greenblatt says. From a design standpoint, the chairs needed to be structurally stable enough to stand up to the elements—with the aesthetics needed to catch the eye of passers-by. Atomic Design senior art director Conway Allison handled the physical design of the chairs, and said sourcing the aluminum framework was a challenge considering the project’s tight deadline. “Keeping the chair in respective scale to a director’s chair, with all the parts feeling the right size while satisfying the integrity, and keeping them upright and safe was a big challenge,” Allison says. Ballast for the massive chairs was a major necessity. The chair structures alone weighed approximately 1,000 pounds. In order to keep them standing upright in a worst-case scenario (think hurricane-force winds), designers had to ballast the base of the chairs with 2,400 pounds. “All in all they weighed roughly 3,500 pounds,” Allison says. Also in each base structure was a laptop computer, which sent video and text message information to the plasma screen. A small portable generator powered each chair setup. The seat itself was constructed of a textaline mesh vinyl fabric which was printed with AmEx and Tribeca Film Fest logos. Lights, camera, action!
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