LED, kindly light

Ever heard of a light-DJ? Neither had we until we dressed up and hit the dance floor at Chennai’s newest watering hole, Elevate. The lounge and bar located at The Chariot hotel in Valluvar Kottam is possibly the first in the city to have a ceiling space that can be programmed to change colour based on the tempo of the music. And City Express caught up with the woman behind it all – Rebeca Sanchez who flew in for the club’s opening all the way from Spain.

So did you spend a good amount of time in Chennai to handle this project?

Actually, I just got here! It’s my first time in Chennai, although my company LEDs Control has handled about four other projects for clubs in other parts of India.

Wait a minute. If you just got here, how did you design Elevate’s LED ceiling?

Oh, we do a lot of projects via Skype and email.  As long as the space is a regular shape, I can imagine it and design patterns in my head from whichever part of the world I am in. The nature of the job is that we travel a lot, at least six cities a year.

Okay, so why make the trip now?

Once the job is done, it’s important to show the client the potential of his toy (LED ceiling). There are multiple programmes that are pre-fixed and can be handled by the resident DJ…It’s a lot of fun actually, it’s like playing Pacman.

How did you get into this business?

I was 17 when the idea came to me and I got pretty popular at the time because I was the only girl doing this stuff in Mexico. Also, I learnt pretty quickly because I had a strong music sense - I can feel when music is more pink or more blue, you know? I went on to do a course in lighting design later in Barcelona.

What’s been your craziest project yet?

We did about 800 LED fixtures on a nightclub ceiling in Ibiza, so those numbers were huge! Usually people ask for their ceilings to be lit up because it is the most visible space for a crowd, compared to a wall or floor. But once we did handle the floor space of a public space – a museum square (about a 1,000 sq metres) in Barcelona and the LED tiles were designed to change colour every time a passerby blew into a trumpet! 

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