At the Madrid club Florida Retiro, house designer Fernando Rodriguez-Berzosa creates stunning lightshow spectacles, and powers them with his ChamSys MagicQ MQ80 console.
Having been responsible for programming visuals at Florida Retiro since 2016, Rodriguez-Berzosa works with director Juan Ramos to create shows that reflect the passion and style of the popular venue. “The biggest challenge of designing for the dinner show here is to ensure that the light always matches the audience’s experience,” he said. “In addition to supporting the entertainment, we must create the right atmosphere to accompany different dishes.”
Inspired by the likes of Wassily Kandinsky, one of the first artists to outline the psychological and physiological effects of color and shape on taste perception and emotion, Rodriguez-Berzosa transports guests on a journey through an ever-changing spectrum of lighting atmospheres. For example, he will use round shapes and warm tones, for starters, turn to reds on entrees, and end up with intense club lighting by the time the meal wraps up.
With over 150 lighting fixtures in his rig, and shows that often have to undergo changes to reflect different performances, Rodriguez-Berzosa appreciates the flexibility and intuitive simplicity of his MagicQ MQ 80. He also values its fast morphing and cloning, as well as how easy the console makes it for him to create fixture profiles.
“We have a full production schedule, so it is very convenient to copy things from my existing show files,” he said. “Also having the cues on the console lined up and ready to go gives me the ability to change moods at my fingertips. Being able to group effects is also a big-time saver. As a result, I can focus more of my time on implementing a number of conceptual ideas regarding the psychology of color and shape.”
A ChamSys user since his “MQ100 Pro2010 days,” Rodriguez-Berzosa finds that the easy-to-navigate 12-inch touchscreen on the MQ80 fits his style. “Some operators love to write on keyboards at 100 wpm speed macro lines that make you dizzy, but not me,” he said. “I am more the kind of a supermarket-checker programmer: I want to push buttons to get what I am after. This screen gives me more freedom, so do the visualiser and the plot view, the output window in grid mode, the group effects, and the execute window with all its access to colors, macros and faders.”
These time savers, give Rodriguez-Berzosa greater freedom to explore new ideas in his design. “People come to Florida Retiro with the expectation of seeing the extraordinary,” he said. “The simpler my console makes the design routine, the more I can push ideas that give the audience an experience they’ve never seen before.”
