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| We do events in: Toronto Ajax Oshawa Pickering Whitby Scarborough Mississauga Markham Guelph Hamilton York Kitchener-Waterloo Niagara Falls Burlington Oakville Peterborough London Kingston Sudbury Thunder Bay Montreal Quebec ... and other areas. So call us! |
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| Full service rentals... to get your events noticed |
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| Back in 1984, I was 14 and living in St-Sauveur, in the Laurentian region of rural Quebec. One evening I -- and likely everyone else in the town -- noticed a mysterious light majestically sweeping across the sky. I was enthralled. I convinced my mom to drive me around to find the source (getting her to agree was no easy task: it was a school night... and late). After about half an hour we finally found it: an old WW2 searchlight was being used to advertise a new restaurant opening. I stood there in awe, and solemnly proclaimed to myself "now THAT is what I'm gonna do; I'm going to start a searchlight business". |
| For the next 3 years I researched carbon arcs, parabolic reflectors, and DC generators. See, I didn't have the funds to buy an actual searchlight; I was going to make it. I spent hundreds of hours in libraries, and hundreds of dollars in long distance calls, amassing as much info as I could. Let me tell you, researching anything before Al Gore had invented the Internet wasn’t easy. I got to work. I had to make my own parabolic reflector. My best friend Gab Allard helped me hot-glue about 1200 1"-square mirrors (that we had cut by hand from a full-size wall mirror) onto a 5' parabolic satellite dish. I made my own arc lamp source, using a toaster oven as a resistor (I'm not yanking your chain here, folks), and carbon rods that I extracted from gutted D-size batteries. I made the body for the light using a cut out section of a water tank. I was nuts. |
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| Well, after a few sloppy prototypes, I realised that I had to bite the bullet and start shopping for the real thing. In 1987 I located a 1942 GE searchlight, with its original generator, in Baltimore. The gent who owned it was retiring, and closing his searchlight advertising outfit. Again, my wonderful and accomodating mom agreed to drive me and Gab down to Maryland to see the unit. I liked it, and offered all I had to my name: $9000. To my relief, he accepted, and about a month later a flatbed truck plunked the unit down on our snowy driveway. I started renting the big old beast on a purely casual basis, as I was 17 and just starting college. But things started picking up. I was getting some steady clients -- one of my first was Bourbon Street bar in Mont Rolland, Quebec -- and making a name for myself. And that name, my very first company, was Skyscraper Searchlights. But that first light was huge, I mean it was a beast, heavy, and not terribly reliable. I needed to move up. |
| A few more months of library time, plus another big long distance phone bill, and I discovered the latest in searchlight technology: multihead xenon lights! No operator needed… four beams… no messy carbon rods… now this was revolutionary. And yes, I had to have one. So in 1996, I brought in the first multihead searchlight, the BeamDancer. It really was an instant hit. Business was so good that I ditched school about a year later to become a full-time entrepreneur. If you've read this far (or if you know me personally), you'll see that I can't stay still for long. I'm always looking for my next fix (in promotional terms). So in 2001 I imported the first Pani large-format projector to the area. We were now able to project images -- both art and ads -- onto the sides of buildings at sizes up to 10 000 sf. Fast forward to 2003 -- recently married and with my first child, a beautiful 2-year old daughter -- we decided that we needed a change. So we moved our personal and professional lives to the Toronto area. And never looked back. |
| And this is my story. |
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| Yup, I'm Matt. |
| Thanks to all my clients, some new and some repeat, and some who've even become good friends over the 7 years we've been here. |