Online home fitness startup GRNDHOUSE recently equipped its studio with a custom LED lighting rig designed by Hayden Borgars, featuring Martin Professional VDO Sceptron 10 LED video fixtures supplied by Colour Sound Experiment.
Conceived and launched during the COVID-19 pandemic, GRNDHOUSE provides daily workout videos with professional instructors via a subscription service. Members can follow along at their own pace with a flexible schedule, on-demand access and a range of intensity levels. When launching the service, GRNDHOUSE’s founders knew their broadcast studio needed excellent lighting and a distinctive visual design to establish the company’s brand. To achieve this goal, GRNDHOUSE hired lighting designer Hayden Borgars, who designed a dynamic LED lighting system using Martin VDO Sceptron 10 creative LED fixtures, which were provided by HARMAN distributor Colour Sound Experiment.
“The brief for the design was to create a space for the instructors to film their workout classes in, which would be unique and work with GRNDHOUSE’s color scheme,” said Borgars. “Our videographer Chris Jeffers suggested incorporating tubes into the design, and I knew instantly that I wanted to use Sceptron fixtures.”
To create the look of illuminated tubes, Borgars’ design features eight Martin VDO Sceptron 10 fixtures standing vertically around the instructors. Another 16 fixtures are arranged in a square on the floor, framing the space and providing crucial illumination for floor-level exercises. During workout sessions, the lights are synchronized to display static colors during low- to medium-intensity portions and switch to dynamic, high-energy video effects during high-intensity segments.
“We’ve been using pixel-based effects across the Sceptron units to visually increase and decrease the intensity of each section of the workouts,” added Borgars. “We keep things static during the main body of the workouts, and then switch to fast-paced pixel effects for the finishers.”
With high-quality 16-bit per color image processing technology and 10mm pixel pitch, Martin VDO Sceptron 10 creative LED video fixtures produce rich, vibrant colors and extremely smooth motion effects. Each LED pixel is precisely calibrated for brightness and color, giving the fixtures a completely consistent look. Hybrid P3 and DMX control allows for flexible video mapping and seamless integration with other lighting and video solutions. Integrated power and data cabling allowed Borgars to daisy-chain the fixtures to a single power supply with no loss in power or data transmission.
“I like how the VDO Sceptron 10 can have more than one purpose,” said Borgars. “We’ve been using them as a main light source, an effect light and a set piece. The VDO Sceptron 10 allowed us to control every pixel and run video effects through each fixture. This changed the way we used the fixtures within each workout class and teaser video.”
Having already created over 12 months’ worth of daily workouts, GRNDHOUSE continues to produce content on a regular basis. With a broad user base and a devoted community of fitness enthusiasts, the company is on track to change the way people think about exercise.
“Streaming and on-demand classes will still be popular after COVID-19,” Borgars opined. “Although gyms have started to re-open, GRNDHOUSE has seen its subscribers sticking to home-based workouts, or taking its classes to the gym with their phones.”
