Jayson Marrs and Jetmir Zymeri, owners of the chic Denver LoDo lounge The Lure, approached me (Benny Yarnell) about designing a website that would capture the feel, the atmosphere… if not the very ethos of their establishment. Crucial details that defined their space involved ground breaking lighting technology, furnishings custom-constructed of colorado-specific materials and textiles, and the aim for a specific sense of fashion, attitude, and lifestyle. The space is distinctly long and narrow, and most of the action takes place along one wall running the length of the building. Being a regular patron along with mutual friends of Jayson and Jetmir, I was very familiar with the aforementioned fashion, attitude and lifestyle the guys were targeting. I felt I was the right guy for the job, but capturing all those details in a compelling site that would rock Denver’s nightlife scene is a tall order, no matter how you look at it.
The idea to create a faux-3D interactive site that essentially recreates the space virtually using only 2D photographs came to me out of the blue at about 2:00AM. It seemed obvious to perhaps photograph all the interior details of the space with creative angles, throw in a few shots of the typical Lure crowd, and create a nice little flash movie atop a minimal, basic layout… but having just completed the Littleton Cyclery site, which uses a similar faux-3D interactive concept, and realizing the long, narrowness of the space… well, I had somewhat of an epiphany, and my mind was set.
I thought of the site like a widescreen movie, with a side-sweep tracking shot. But to achieve this effect with still photography, and to extract the layers of people and chairs and other elements that create the 3D effect, I essentially had to do three separate photoshoots. The main shoot of the bar interior was the most challenging, and the final photo you see in the site is actually a comp of approximately 40 photos; I did long exposures of the interior on a tripod and repeated this over and over again, taking one step sideways with the camera per shot. This was necessary as the space was too narrow for me to get enough distance from the wall, and being that close to the subject means the lens will create a fishbowl effect. Only a very narrow strip of each photo, which had the least distortion, was usable.
The second shoot was to retrace my steps, but to populate the scene with people and chairs. The third shoot was actually shot in a studio, where I had additional models to fill in spots that seemed too vacant in the previous shoots. The subsequent photoshop sessions were brutal, and there was much digital painting and manipulating to extract layers for depth. But with a hefty .psd file ready for Flash, Steve took the reigns and made the whole grand concept and all of it’s maddening parts sing in harmony.
view project :: the lure lounge
