MTV Loaded (1999) featuring VJ Sonia Couling
The Year 1999 was Peter Chung's Aeon Flux on Liquid TV and Sam Keith's MAXX on MTV, and as well the year I came off my 3rd feature ("Street Angels"), and before starting on my fourth ("Song of the Stork") ... 1999 was also the year I designed the compare set for "MTV Loaded" for MTV Asia, which starred VJ Sonia Couling as the main host.
The show was going all "hi-tech" (read the show description in image above, remembering this was "1998"), and required a bar-stool set-up for a host, a work-station, a plasma screen at the side, essentially a "VJ" / "Video-Jockey" basic set-up in the late 90s.
The set is comparatively one of the smaller studio sets I had designed, with movable flat/flattage (for easier in-studio settings, as non-shoot days, it would be stored at the side of studio), which quite frankly was a "worry", as my set was nearly all-WHITE in colour.
One of the adages in (local) TV design, was not to use the color "white", but instead a "light grey" instead. As the lighting would cause the surface to over-expose and visually white-out on camera. But for this specific design, we had gone for a literal "black-n-white" clean and sleek theme, with a focus on "hi-tech", within the budget (of course), and the plasma screen which sat on a metallic sheen silver surface, which technically would remain unlit, but ended up looking a dark shade of grey (on hindsight, I could have added a in-built surface light tube to partially illuminate the surface, and getting a twisted shimmer while I'm at it, innit?).
The host was to be predominantly dressed in (shades of) white too, so that would be fun, with her slightly tanned complexion/skin tone standing out / contrasting with the white background.
I've had larger images (since lost in my dead laptop), with these small-sized low-res images featured here, with my apologies, but for the sketches I literally found today!
This was as well a set design I used a mock-up paper folded-model to help present my concept for, which til this day I wished I had taken a photo of, at least.
Cheers
Andy Heng
