TORRANCE, CA— Marshall Electronics continues to inspire creative production solutions in live performance environments. Massachusetts-based tour design company TERLECKI // DE JONG recently cleverly concealed a Marshall CV228 HD Lipstick Camera into a 1950s Electro-Voice 664 microphone to capture intimate live visuals for indie pop artist Del Water Gap’s “Chasing the Chimera” tour.
TERLECKI // DE JONG Co-founder, Designer and Creative Director, Maxwell Fitzgerald Terlecki, and his business partner, Travis Gunnar de Jong, specialize in designing immersive visual environments for touring artists. For the Del Water Gap tour, Terlecki sought a way to incorporate video elements without introducing a visible camera element that might disrupt the stage aesthetic.
“I bought a Marshall CV228 Lipstick Camera because it’s incredibly small and has a very low profile on stage,” says Terlecki. “People often mount them on mic stands, but I wanted to push it further and completely hide the camera inside the housing of a microphone.”
The camera was carefully installed inside the classic microphone, allowing it to be in plain sight while remaining virtually invisible to audiences. “From the audience perspective, all you see is what appears to be an ambient microphone on stage,” says Terlecki. “In reality, there’s a camera hidden inside of it, capturing the shot. It’s kind of hidden in plain view.”
The live camera feed is projected onto a large canopy element above the stage, creating a dramatic visual focal point. Designed by Terlecki De Jong and fabricated by the soft goods company, Sew What?, the canopy envelops the performance area while serving as a projection surface for real-time visuals.
“We have a projector at front of house that sends the image up to this canopy above the stage,” adds Terlecki. “The CV228 camera gives us an intimate shot of the performer that expands into a huge image overhead.”
Beyond the camera’s compact footprint, Terlecki credits the CV228’s image quality and flexibility as key reasons it worked so well for the design. According to Terlecki, “What I love about this camera is how unbelievably tiny it is, but it’s also extremely sharp and clear. The raw image is very versatile. It takes coloring and effects extremely well.”
For the “Chasing the Chimera” tour, the visual team processes the feed through Resolume software, stripping the color entirely to create a high-contrast black-and-white look. “We remove all saturation and then just play with a little contrast and exposure,” says Terlecki. “That’s really it. The image coming from the Marshall camera is strong enough that we don’t have to do much to it.”
Terlecki first discovered Marshall’s lipstick cameras while designing visuals for punk band Amyl and the Sniffers, for whom multiple units were deployed across the stage. “We used as many as five Marshall lipstick cameras on that tour,” adds Terlecki. “I already knew how small they were and how good they looked. That’s what made me start thinking about more creative ways to hide them on stage.”
For Terlecki, minimizing visible production gear is an important part of stage design. “From a design standpoint, the more you can get away from seeing equipment on stage, the better,” says Terlecki. “If you can hide cables and cameras — anything that distracts from the performance, you end up with a much cleaner and more immersive visual experience.”
For Marshall Electronics, the project highlights the flexibility of its compact camera systems in creative production environments. “Seeing designers push our cameras into new creative applications is always exciting,” says Bernie Keach of Marshall Electronics. “Maxwell’s approach to integrating the CV228 into a vintage microphone housing is a great example of how compact cameras can open up entirely new visual possibilities for live performance.”
As TERLECKI // DE JONG continues designing immersive experiences for touring artists, Marshall cameras are likely to remain part of the creative toolkit.