"An awards show of that size and pressure is like going into battle in the trenches," says Kenny. "In New York, everybody thinks they know how to be the mayor, the president of the United States and the lighting designer of the VMAs. You just have to hold your ground and do your show."
Working under such mission-critical conditions Kenny sought reliability and dependability as well as great creative scope from his lighting instruments. "I used Coemar Infinitys as the firepower on the show," he says. "All the lights pointing to the cameras were Infinitys. All the uplights and downlights were Coemar ParLite LEDs. And in the Michael Jackson tribute, we deployed all the effects the Infinity had to offer to accompany the video of 'Thriller' that was played."
According to Kenny, the 158 Infinity Wash XLs, 19 Infinity ACL S spots and 40 ParLite 12º LEDs supplied by Scharff Weisberg "complemented the other fixtures we used and really helped me create the looks I wanted."
Coemar Infinity Wash XL lights feature a groundbreaking new colour mix system able to achieve CMY and RGB colours (CMY patent pending). There's also an effects wheel for creating texture and aerial effects with wash light (patent pending) as well as a beam-shaper rotating and indexing at 360 degrees (patent pending).
The Infinity ACL S is also renowned for its superior brightness, offering more brightness than a 1200W fixture in a 250W package. Other key features include variable beam size and beam control with rotating aerial effects; moon flower effect; split colour beam effects; and CMY colour mixing.Coemar's ParLite LED, with standard lens 12º, is an ideal digital substitute for the analog PAR can. It provides a 75-82 percent energy savings compared to traditional technology at the same brightness and is lightweight, quiet and flicker-free. It offers RGB colour mixing and electronic strobe plus synchronized, random and pulse effects.
"Since doing the VMAs I've had millions of texts from people, including the head of Viacom, about the show's lighting," Kenny notes. "I've used Coemar Infinitys on VH1 'Storytellers' too, and they always nail it."
(Lee Baldock)
