Entertainment engineering specialist WIcreations celebrated its 10th birthday in style over the weekend with a large party for its many fans, friends, clients and acquaintances in home town Heist-op-den-Berg, Belgium.
Founded by Hans Willems and now has 14 full time staff all with multi-disciplinary knowledge, a team of top project managers, an extensive R ‘n’ D department, an international portfolio of clients and numerous projects, large and small, standard and esoteric on the CV. WIcreations is engaged on a constant stream of eclectic projects from installations to live events and performances, each needing clever elements of customised rigging, flying, lifting, turning and moving objects and systems.
Safety and doing things to inscrutably high standards has always been a core value of WI projects and in addition to all the fabrication and motion control assignments, a unique practical range of off-the-shelf WI products have been developed and are now in rental stock. Towers, trussing and assorted tracking and automation elements have been designed to be efficient and cost-effective and make basic ‘automation’ available to all levels of shows, events and touring.
WIcreations kicked off its first year of trading in 2006 auspiciously designing stage and movement elements for Holiday On Ice’s Mystery show, the Asian Games in Doha, Bon Jovi, U2’s Vertigo tour and Belgian rockers Clouseau. They included devising the movement and control for a massive video constructed from 384 panels of Lighthouse R16 that tracked 110m along platform 9 of St Pancreas station in London for the launch of High Speed One (HS1), splitting into 8 sections and various other configurations during the show.
Another was engineering the supporting grid for U2’s incredible 360 tour’s concertina-ing video screen in 2009; then the company’s expertise was harnessed to wirelessly slide a seating tribune – complete with 2000 audience – 90m back and forth throughout the ground-breaking 14-18 Spektakel in Mechelen in 2014, as well as 11 scenery wagons which moved on, off and around the performance area.
In this past 12 months WI devised the system to move Beyonce’s massive video Monolith; engineered and delivered fully wirelessly operated, self-driving LED video cubes – based on their ingenious laser guided wagon system for a pre-launch of the brand new Peugeot 3008 SUV; and designed and supplied motion control, customised staging and hardware / infrastructure for Russian singer and superstar Philipp Kirkorov’s tour featuring spectacular show design by Creative Director, Franco Dragone – amongst many others.
WI is still working for many long-term clients like Clouseau, for which they are promising “something very special” for the maverick Belgian rockers’ upcoming shows at Antwerp Sportpalais in December. Hans enthusiastically declared: “we are ready for the next step” – which will include expanding the work more globally and pushing the brand and its penchant for creative technical solutions to new highs.
