Elation at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival
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Lighting designer Alex Jainchill is using dynamic lighting from Elation Professional on the play, including ZCL 360 Bar wash/effect lights and Platinum Wash 16R Pro moving heads, as well as colour-changing Elation Flex LED Tape.
UniSon is the story of a dying poet who leaves a mysterious box to his apprentice with strict instructions to destroy it. The apprentice opens it however, releasing seven ‘Terrors’ that tormented the poet through his life. The seven different Terrors allowed Jainchill to use six of the ZCL 360 Bar fixtures to treat the Terrors not featured in the scene in a different way using a saturated colour specific to each.
“All of the features in this fixture were important in this play,” Jainchill states of the LED moving batten effects with zoom functionality. “I’ve used them on other shows and love them. On UniSon, we used them as lighting fixtures, but also created a pixel map with each cell of each ZCL Bar as a pixel, which is an application that I think is great and unique to the functionality of this fixture.”
Built into the edging of the multiple platforms on the stage deck was Elation’s versatile Flex LED Tape, thin, flexible and bright LED pixel tape, an easy solution for simple color washing and pixel mapping possibilities. “One of the things we were tasked with in this production was differentiating when actors were quoting August Wilson's poetry,” Jainchill says. “Going into tech we honestly didn't know exactly how we were going to achieve this. We ended up using the Flex LED Tape WP in the deck for this purpose.” Jainchill says that he and director O’Hara called them the ‘August Wilson lights’.
“Because we had to use them in every scene in this capacity, it was great to be able to change their colour to match to video or to fit the scene we were using them in,” Jainchill continues. “We also were able to drive video content through them as well as get great kinetic movement out of them during musical numbers. With a little more tech time, I think we would've gone even further down the rabbit hole of everything this application allowed us to do.”
(Jim Evans)
