Fabric Art for Entertainment Venues

Entertainment venues such as theaters, amusement parks, and museums were among the earliest adopters of soft signage and other digitally printed fabrics. That’s not surprising because they have long used custom-decorated fabrics to help audiences imagine being in another time or place. Most entertainment production companies already have well-established relationships with suppliers of specialty fabrics for theaters, museum galleries, and event spaces.

For example, theaters have used hand-painted textiles since the 16th century. Long before it was feasible to print full-color images on big fabric panels, scenic artists hand-painted murals onto muslin and other fabrics that could be easily raised and lowered during different acts of a play. Today, set designers can choose fabrics to improve the acoustics of a performance space, mask distracting elements, or create artistic visual effects with different types of lighting.

Companies that have historically decorated short runs of fabrics for theaters, theme parks, and exhibits are now well equipped to digitally print and sew soft signage for a broad spectrum of clients, including those who add performance spaces to their events, trade-shows, museums, or experiential campaigns.

Two companies with considerable experience in producing fabric-based products for the entertainment business include Olympus Group and the Printhead Studio division of the Rose Brand theatrical fabrics and production supplies company.

The Olympus Group

Performers in the Hideaway Heist show on a Royal Caribbean Cruise Line ship wore lizard costumes made with dye-sub-printed fabrics from Olympus Group.

Since 1893, the Milwaukee, Wis.-based Olympus Group has used the latest technologies to make relatively small runs of fabric products. At first, they made flags and pennants for sports teams. They began sewing U.S. flags in 1914, and added screen-printing equipment to make short runs of apparel and uniforms.

In the 70s and 80s, the lower cost of sewing labor overseas enticed brands and retailers to move a lot of the production of apparel and soft goods out of the U.S. Olympus Group adapted to the shift by making large, one-off fabric banners for amusement parks, trade shows, and theaters.

According to Brian Adam, president of the Olympus Group, “We decided to specialize in large one-off graphics because entertainment-industry clients weren’t likely to send them overseas for production.”

Because entertainment set designers want something unique, they often prefer working with a local fabricator who can help them execute their artistic vision.

When wide-format electrostatic (toner-based) dye-sublimation was introduced in the early 1980s, Olympus Group was one of the first companies to test it for large-format fabric graphics. They were also among the earliest adopters of first-generation wide-format inkjet dye-sublimation printers.

Today, Olympus Group has production facilities in Milwaukee, Wis. and Orlando, Fla. These facilities use a combination of direct digital printing, screen printing, and dye-sublimation printing systems to decorate a wide variety of fabrics and hard substrates. In-house finishing capabilities includes a full-service sewing department and a variety of cutting and routing devices.

Olympus Group also has a creative design agency in Grand Rapids, Mich. This group helps clients come up with eye-popping ideas for exhibits, out-of-home advertising, and point-of-purchase displays.

The Olympus Group currently operates three complementary divisions: mascot costumes; U.S. and custom flags; and custom graphics.

The panels on the ceiling of the theater of the Celebrity Silhouette cruise ship were wrapped in Whisper Tex noise-control fabric that had been dye-sub-printed by Olympus Group in Orlando, Fla.

About half the company’s custom-graphics business comes from trade shows. The other half comes from theme parks. Entertainment industry clients have included Disney, Universal Studios, Sea World, Disney Cruise Lines, Carnival Cruise Lines, and Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines.

Because Olympus Group employs about 60 sewing professionals, they can handle the growing volume of fabric-printing projects that come in during the spring and fall trade-show seasons. About 95% of the fabrics Olympus prints for trade shows are printed with wide-format and superwide-format inkjet dye-sublimation printers.

Olympus keeps one of their 20 inkjet dye-sublimation printers loaded with fluorescent green and pink inks instead of Light Cyan and Light Magenta. Fluorescent inks are popular for certain theme-park installations and seasonal decorations, such as Halloween.

When the seamstresses in the Olympus finishing department aren’t busy with trade-show and event graphics or theme-park projects, they sew U.S. flags. Some states and retailers insist that all U.S. flags sold must be manufactured in the U.S., so the Olympus Group makes those to stock.

All mascots are manufactured in Olympus Group’s Milwaukee facility. The Olympus Group has been manufacturing mascots since the 1950s and early 1960s, when they were printing hats and aprons for employees of McDonald’s. When brand marketers at McDonald’s wanted to create a character called Ronald McDonald, they turned to Olympus Group for help. Because Ronald McDonald was so popular, Olympus Group was hired to make supporting characters, such as the Hamburglar, Birdie, Grimace, and the Fry Kids.

While McDonald’s has moved away from using these mascots in their marketing, other brands have commissioned Olympus Group to make mascot costumes that bring their brands to life. The Olympus Group has produced a wide array of well-known mascots, including the Energizer Bunny, the Geico Gecko, Yogi Bear, the University of Louisville Cardinal, the University of Wisconsin Badger, and The Famous Racing Sausages that entertain Milwaukee Brewers baseball fans at Miller Park.

To make the heads and/or bodies for the mascots, Olympus Group craftspeople hand sculpt a dense-foam mold. Then they vacuum form plastic to the shape of the mold. After fabric has been attached to the mold, The Olympus Group 3D-prints decorative elements.

“Bringing giant characters to life is fun,” Adam says, who once played the Fluffy Badger mascot at the University of Wisconsin. “We are the largest producer of mascot costumes in the U.S.”

He notes that entertainment companies such as Disney typically have their own costume departments. But designers will order yards of custom-printed fabrics for costumers that require it.

During the company’s 126 years in business, Olympus Group has produced more than 20,000 mascot costumes and worked with 45% of the Fortune 500 companies on either custom graphics or mascot characters.

Rose Brand/Printhead Studio

Secaucus, N.J.-based Printhead Studio is a division of Rose Brand Inc., a company that has been a leading supplier of soft good and production supplies to the entertainment and event industries for more than 95 years.

Rose Brand understands the intricacies of theater set design very well. Since 1921, they have sold theatrical fabrics, production supplies, and stage hardware to venues ranging from high-school auditoriums to Radio City Music Hall. They sell dozens of types of flame-retardant fabrics to set decorators and artists who want to paint scenic backdrops, make stage curtains, or build screens for outdoor projections.

This tab curtain at Texas Christian University was designed by Brian Clinnin and produced by Rose Brand and Printhead Studio.

Rose Brand opened a West Coast facility in Los Angeles in 1995 and acquired Swag Décor to serve the growing Florida market for event and décor services in 2015.

After outsourcing printing for almost 20 years, Rose Brand opened Printhead Studio as a separate division in 2017. Printhead Studio partnered with Durst to bring the first 16-ft.-wide Durst RhoTex 500 printer to North America.

Finding a 16-ft.-wide printer with an expanded color gamut was essential to meeting their customers’ requirements, says Printhead Studio’s director of digital printing Michael Reed. With the printer’s six-color inkset (CMYK plus Orange and Violet), Printhead Studio prints images and designs on soft fabrics for theater backdrops, special events, outdoor events, museum exhibits, and architectural interiors.

“Our customers love the fact that we can deliver a 16-ft.-high seamless backdrop in virtually any length,” Reed says. “Those dimensions are large enough for tons of seamless printed backdrops and décor used in theaters, events, trade shows, visual merchandising, advertising, museum exhibits, architectural interiors, and outdoor media. Customers no longer have to worry about how their artwork will match up along the seams, because there are no seams.”

Customers of Printhead Studios have access to Rose Brand’s large and experienced finishing department. More than 100 stitchers are available to work on banners, scenic backdrops, backlit images, ground cloths, stretch fabrics, and kabuki drops (e.g. lightweight fabric that drops swiftly to reveal performers, a new space, or a product.) Making grand-format backlit banners wouldn’t be possible without expert stitchers, says Reed.

For a gala event at Lincoln Center in New York, Matthew David of 360 Design Events LTD chose to use Lightbox fabric to create a backlit photo mural that was 30-ft.-high and 60-ft.-wide. Even when the image was printed on a 122"-wide roll of fabric, the stitchers had to sew six 10-yard-long panels. The sewing had to be perfect because the dramatic nighttime skyline image on the mural featured many detailed windows, streets, glows, and other elements that would have looked disjointed if the panels had not been expertly sewn. “There really was no room for error,” Reed says.

The fabric-printing experts at Rose Brand and Printhead Studio can advise clients on which textiles are best in terms of color reproduction, stretchability, sound transmission, wind blow-through, fire-retardance, translucency, transparency, weather resistance, durability, and texture. For example, they can recommend an economical, mesh fabric for short-term outdoor concerts or a poly silk fabric for large Kabuki drops.

Theater and Stage Design is an Art

Although event marketing and experiential marketing borrow staging practices from theatrical productions, designing a theme-park attraction or theater set will always be a true art form. The designers who craft sets for theaters, TV production, and theme parks typically receive specialized training at theater-arts programs at universities such as Carnegie Mellon University, Savannah College of Art and Design, and the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. Some designers belong to associations such as the Themed Entertainment Association.

Unlike stages created for special events or promotions, the performance spaces of theaters and theme park attractions are designed to dazzle and delight paying customers. The props, scenery, and environmental graphics play an integral role in the success of a production. Originality and visual impact matter, because when people spend precious leisure time on entertainment, they expect a memorable, emotionally powerful environment that lets them escape their everyday routines.

Working with clients from theme parks and theaters is different than producing standard-sized display graphics for retail or trade-show clients, says The Olympus Group’s Adam.

“Scene designers may want you to create something that’s never been created before, such as a tattered sail for a pirate ship,” he says. “It helps to be local, so you can make site visits or meet with the designers to find out exactly what they want.”

Printhead Studio helps a wide range of clients put on shows, says Reed. Whether the stage is in a high school, religious venue, Las Vegas resort, museum, theme park, cruise ship, or concert arena, each customer has a different range of experience and quality expectations.

“We take a collaborative approach to every job and have great resources to solve the unusual requests we often get,” Reed says. The Rose Brand staff has a wide range of experience in entertainment production.

“Many staff members were customers in the past, which makes them a great resource for our customers,” Reed notes. “The focus of my job hasn’t really changed from my own scenery building days. Printhead’s focus is to understand each designer’s goal and get the best possible print on stage, on time, and on budget.”