A step-and-repeat is the sponsor-studded banner or wall that serves as a backdrop for photographs at event. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Step and Repeat”
I learned a term the other day, step and repeat.
Do you know what this is, a step and repeat?
I bet you do.
We learned it at the same place.
Oh, really?
Yeah, it’s the visual thing behind people who take photographs at like galas and special events that has all the logos that are repeated.
Yes.
Yeah.
So the long sheet of paper or foam core or board or whatever behind them, the curtain.
Yeah, it’s called a step and repeat or a step and repeat wall or a press wall.
And it’s one of those publicity backdrops that has all those logos behind the celebrities or whomever is getting photographed.
What’s really interesting to me is that step and repeat is an older term that has to do with photographic printing involving or pertaining to a procedure where you do something, where it’s a mechanism where you do one step and then another step, and then you do the same first step again, like when you’re printing stamps or printing backgrounds for checks.
So I thought that was really fascinating when I learned that it was transferred to this backdrop.
Oh, interesting.
But it’s still a printing, a kind of printing.
It’s a kind of printing, but there’s also the idea there of you have the celebrity standing there, and you bring one person up to have a photograph with them, and then the other person up.
Oh, I see.
Yeah, so it’s kind of a combination of this.
But that’s not where the name comes.
It comes from the printing.
No, but I think it’s reinforced by that idea, a step and repeat.
Very good.
The high-tech version of step and repeat are “stepper” machines at the heart of semiconductor fabrication. Every integrated circuit “chip” on every circuit board of every electronic gadget you’ve ever used in the last forty years has been produced by these incredibly precise and expensive machines. Operating at the engineering limits of physics, mechanics, electronics, optics and chemistry, these are arguably the most precise machines used at industrial scale.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepper