Lightning Quick Signs, a family-owned, full-service sign company in Waveland, Mississippi, found itself playing the starring role on a project for Acadiana Cinemas in Picayune, Mississippi.
The movie theater building was recently remodeled and updated after it had been damaged in Hurricane Katrina years ago. As a part of the overhaul, Acadiana needed a new channel letter sign on the front of the building.
Lightning Quick Signs was one of the first companies to bid on the project, and since they were right in Acadiana’s price range, they won the job.
With a tight deadline of only a week-and-a-half to get the job done, Lightning Quick Signs knew there would be no time for reshoots and got right to work on the site survey.
Recently the shop had set out to find a way to make their site surveys more efficient.
“We were looking for an easier way for our sales staff to go out and do site surveys for potential customers without having to send bucket trucks and cranes because it was just costing us a lot of money to send them out there, [especially] for jobs that we may or may not get,” says Kyle Freeman, production and estimating manager at Lightning Quick Signs.
They looked at some low-end laser measuring devices from big-box home improvement stores.
“But we found that the accuracy really wasn’t there,” says Freeman. “We had a couple of them that we only kept for a day or two before bringing them back.”
Eventually a simple Web search led them to ikeGPS’s Spike app, a laser-accurate smartphone measurement solution. Spike includes the device, which attaches to a tablet or phone, as well as the app program itself. (Note: Lightning Quick Signs has three Spike devices—two on Androids and one on an iPad.)
On the Acadiana project, Lightning Quick Signs Owner Gary Knoblock went to the job site and took a picture of the building with the Spike device, which calculated the height, width, area, length, and target location. He then emailed the image with all of the measurements to the graphic designer right from the site.
Since the client already had a logo, the graphic designer only had to bring the file into PhotoShop®, scale it, and start the quoting process. (Note: The graphic designer has a tablet that runs the Spike software but doesn’t include the device to take photographs.)
“By the time [Knoblock] came back, there was already a proof,” says Freeman, “and we were ready to start pricing it within an hour or two of talking to the customer.”
Traditionally, before the design process could even start, Lightning Quick Signs would have had to send a truck out the next day to get firm measurements of the building since it is so large. “So basically Spike cut a day or two off of our normal processes of getting that measurement so we could start scaling things out to get the customer a quote,” says Freeman.
Lightning Quick Signs next moved on to the fabrication scenes of this cinematic project.
The shop fabricated the channel letters for the project in-house using its Accu-Bend machine. The letters were made of .063-inch aluminum backs with five-inch standard channel letter coil returns. The faces were constructed using white acrylic and 3M™ Scotchcal™ Translucent Graphic Film 3630-141 Gold Nugget was used on the logo and “Cinemas” letters.
Using LED Wizard software from Aries Graphics International, Lightning Quick Signs populated the channel letters with white Hanley LED Peregrine Series P-2072 LEDs.
For the install, Lightning Quick Signs brought the letters to the job site on a trailer. From there, they used a Manitex crane to lift the raceway the “Acadiana” letters were on, while an installer in their ETI single-man bucket truck toggle bolted it to the plywood behind the metal façade of the building.
The “Cinemas” channel letters and the logo were individually mounted to the building using wood screws with load-bearing washers.
The Hanley LED power supplies for the “Acadiana” letters were installed in the raceway. Power supplies for the rest of the individually wall-mounted letters and logo were installed in UL-listed LED transformer boxes in the area behind the wall. (Note: All Hanley LED power supplies and LEDs were purchased from Grimco Inc. The LEDs feature a five-year product and three-year limited labor warranty.)
The final product was an immediate box office smash, and Freeman says the customer loved the new letters, which are visible from the highway and pop at night when lit. He says it’s an addition the movie theater will enjoy for years.
“We are big on quality here,” says Freeman. “One of our main selling points is that we are going to build you a sign that’s going to last—not just one to get you open.”
By Ashley Bray
Photos: Lightning Quick Signs (top and bottom); ikeGPS (middle).
