Superfans Neon Signs at the Utilita Arena

Flashing Neon Ultra® ‘SUPERFANS’ signs in Birmingham

The NEC group approached Carousel Lights asking for help in raising the awareness of their Superfans Fanclub, an annual membership loyalty scheme for their Barclaycard Arena (formerly the National Indoor Arena) and Genting Arena (formerly the NEC Arena) in Birmingham.

The NEC group had set up the Superfans Fanclub to offer customers benefits including early access, discounts and an exclusive happy hour.

SUPERFANS Neon Sign design

A 2D graphic of the design had been developed with a neon style effect, and the team asked Carousel Lights to bring this design as 3D neon signs for both venues in Birmingham.

Our NeonUltra® product was ideal for this as, being made from solid opal acrylic, it’s extremely robust which is a key attribute for being located in such a high traffic area. The decision was also made to place a protective acrylic cover over the face of it as one of them was within reach of customers who may have become a little overexcited at combining exclusive Happy Hour discounts with watching their favourite band live.

The NEC team wanted the neon signage to catch people’s attention, and with the graphic design consisting of both blue and hot pink elements, it was perfectly suited to being supplied with a pre-programmed DMX (Digital Multiplex) controller.

DMX neon sign detail

We can supply signage with different DMX setups, but for any DMX-controllable signs, there are 3 key elements that are required:

• A type of illumination that is able to be controlled. In this instance, we used RGBW LED tape.
• a DMX controller. This is the element that tells the light what it wants to do.
• A DMX encoder. This is the ‘ears’ of the system and translates that signal it gets from the controller into an action for the LEDs to undertake (eg dimming).

It can often be the case in professional settings such as live music tours that we only supply the sign with a DMX encoder as the controlling is done through the clients own lighting desk as they want the sign to sync with the rest of the stage lights, smoke machines and fans that have been supplied by others.

In this instance, the client told us how they wanted the light to animate – mostly blue but occasionally flashing to pink – so we pre-programmed a DMX controller with their desired animation sequence.

To agree the sequence, firstly we itemised it on an excel spreadsheet and then for SUPERFANS we were able to provide an animated gif showing how it would animate. This then loops.

The overall results was a real showstopper and then team at NEC Group were delighted with the final result.