Club Fantastico: Studio by day, club by night
It’s a simple answer to a question that every club owner faces. How do you maximize your investment in what appears to be a single purpose facility with a nighttime audience? If you’re Magenta, the owners of Club Fantastico, you turn it into a video production studio.
That’s what’s happening down in Once, Argentina, where Club Fantastico is the most popular club around. Its headlining shows bring in top Cumbia, Reggaeton and Cuarteto acts from across South America.
Club Fantastico is where new bands go to get on the map, and established acts play to stay in the spotlight.
And while the nightly concerts are a big hit, the daytime productions are pretty impressive too.
Magenta is a combination of promotion, production, and distribution company, woven together in a complete entertainment supply chain.
Part one: Club Fantastico draws top acts and begins buzz for performers. Part two: Magenta is the sole music and video producer of many Argentinean Cumbia acts, producing music videos to promote their bands. Part three: they broadcast Fantastico radio across Buenos Aires, reinforcing a fan base for their musical acts. Part four: they are producers of Fantastico TV which broadcasts music video across the country, and serve as the agency to connect advertisers with their musicians.
While the above is a complete production chain, the root of their success seems to be how they maximize resources. Turning Club Fantastico into a production studio by day, to utilize the venue around the clock, makes for a great case study.
When Magenta needed a video production studio space, but didn’t want to incur the cost, they took inventory of what they already had.
At the time, they owned Club Fantastico, but it was operating solely as a tropical music club. When they took a closer look at the space, they noticed there were certain elements of a club that were also essential in video production.
The Club Fantastico venue had a large enough space to create a daytime video production studio. It had studio lights. It had established rigging. Most importantly, Magenta owned the space, so scheduling and access was never a concern. As a result, video production began in the club, and has been successfully expanding during the past several years.
Our foreign correspondent Lucy Alba recently went to see a shoot at Club Fantastico. She met with Mr. Hernán Gomez Pujolas, a freelance producer for Magenta, who oversees their video and broadcast productions.
Mr. Pujolas began working with Magenta fifteen years ago, recording and mastering audio productions. When Magenta wanted to expand into video production eight years ago, he helped Magenta transition Club Fantastico into a video production facility. Currently, he produces various video clips that would display with a number to vote for the viewer’s favorite videos, a live TV show called Fantastico TV and advertisements for Fantastico TV advertisers.
When Lucy visited Mr. Pujolas, he was shooting a weekly advertisement for ringtones on the main floor of Club Fantastico. The shoot took a full day, with only a one hour set up and break down.
Mr. Pujolas began the tour starting on the set.
The set staged a chroma screen on the main floor of the club. In front of the chroma screen, a host was presenting with a handheld microphone. The remainder of the lighting was provided from existing “club lights” with a few lights on stands to fill the rest of the set. Finally, one Sony camera on a tripod captured the event.
Upstairs, the control room was equipped with an integrated live production set up. To capture the production, Mr. Pujolas used a Datavideo switcher system complete with monitors and a character generator as the core of the set up.
The production started with the host presenting a band, while promoting ringtones and games. Mr. Pujolas would then cut to a pre-recorded clip or live show of the band, and then cut back to the host, who would introduce the next band.
As the host was presenting, the chroma screen would be keyed out and replaced with various images, graphics and text, all presenting ways to buy the ringtones, wallpapers and cell phone games being advertised. Most of the graphics were prepared ahead of time to allow for seamless integration into the keyed video of the host. Using the character generator, a tech updated lower thirds to match the host’s presentation.
Interestingly enough, the chroma screen was neither blue nor green. It was lavender. Combined with the club lights and the camera, this non-traditional lavender screen fit that ideal “sweet spot” for an excellent chroma key. Lucy noticed that Mr. Pujolas “feels comfortable with it, making good use of the preview, and especially the chroma feature.” Mr. Pujolas said the good key was a result of the switcher being “easy to use”.
Mr. Pujolas also noted the core Datavideo tools worked well together, while effectively accepting 3rd party hardware into the workflow.
The audio from the videos and host were mixed with the Yamaha board, which had 16 input channels to more than accommodate all their inputs.
Given the upstairs and downstairs configuration of the setup, Mr. Pujolas appreciated having the Datavideo intercom system with LED indicators. The previous intercom set up wasn’t designed for video production, as it was the DJ intercom.
It’s a simple concept: get the most out of what you have by being creative in the creative process, and make it as easy as possible on your crew.
By having one shooting location, control over that location, established gear setups, and a reliable easy to use integrated live mix system, Club Fantastico is a great case study in how much value comes from creative thinking and maximizing available resources.
Watch the video below to go to the set.
Joachim Wiese grew up on 12 acres in the cattle country of north central Florida. He now lives in Spanish Harlem in New York City. As a fan of contrast, Joachim loves dynamic range.
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