At the Temple stage on The Common, lighting designer Paul De Villiers provided a set to complement the video-mapped exterior design of the stage structure using the popular, powerful and versatile, Chauvet Professional Legend 412Z wash fixture and the full extent of its 8- to 33-degree zoom range to create a very wide beam stretching across the crowd - adding vital contrast with depth, colour and strobing to the overall lighting display in this Chichen Itza-inspired DJ zone.
Offsetting the intense colour of the structure's exterior, de Villiers counterposed the warm white wash of the Chauvet Professional Nexus Aw 7x7 LED panel wall system on the back of the DJ booth area. The Nexus Aw 7x7 panels provided simple pixel shapes, blinder effects and also shot out aerial effects which 'punched out' the colour from the very wide colour beams of the Chauvet Professional Legend 412Z fixture, which were all mixed through an Avolites Tiger Touch desk.
Paul de Villiers was full of praise. "We had a lot to play with just using the effects of those two different fixtures. The Chauvet Nexus and Legend worked together really well. The strobing was good fun, the zoom was a pretty amazing effect - very wide. The reaction time was really quick, the lights were easy to operate and the colour mixing was very good. On the Nexus, the open white quality is amazing and the dimming curves on the LEDs again, are really good."
Over at the Mutoid Waste Co., founder and British Artist, Joe Rush presented A Kiss on the Apocalypse where the feelings and intentions of the created mutant machines (half animal, half machine) as they roll towards the final moments of earth, were accentuated in LED by the lighting artistry of Nic Romanini, via Chauvet DJ COLORrail IRC IP battens and recently launched Rogue R2 Beam units.
Told in eight mechanical tableaux, the story unfolds of machines feeding on the carcasses of our civilization in metal forests of smoking and firing exhaust pipe trees, through to the re-creation of a universe where love and music pulse in the veins and the cogs of the mutants.
Romanini positioned 48 COLORrail outdoor-rated multicolour strip light units around the ground level production area to create a low-level glow for the scenes acted out by the converted-truck-mutants. The coloured glow changed with the action, so as the 'aquatic' beasts arrived they were highlighted in blue and aqua light, accompanied by fish-like gobo effects in similar colours from the 20 Rogue R2 Beam fixtures positioned amongst the COLORrails.
The beasts from the hot, dry land converged and were favoured in arid palettes of orange and red-brown, supported by suitable selections from the Rogue R2 Beam fixture's 17 inbuilt gobos with their continuous variable-speed wheel scroll. The Rogue R2 Beam fixtures were also positioned to surround the action, facing inwards towards the stage so the aerial effects were used almost as searchlights - from the Osram Sirius 230 W HRI lamp boasting an intense 133,200 lux at 15 m - across an eerily-glowing no-man's-land of war zone.
The final scene depicts the once-truck animals finding love and music and the previous disillusionment of the impending Apocalypse is lifted and hope comes in vibrant shades of red and pink across the performance area.
For Romanini, the Rogue R2 Beam light cannon represented a great investment: "I was very impressed with the R2 Beam, which was really powerful. The effects were easy to configure and use - I had everything I needed in that one unit. The R2 Beam matched my expectation and went further. The COLORrail battens were perfect - the colours were intense and had I needed more power it was there."
Amongst the sensory experience created by LD Chris Bushell
