Fire features a warm wash of saturated reds, oranges and ambers never before seen from LEDs or gels. Ice provides, in one fixture, a palette of deep indigo, blue, cyan, green (and a touch of red) - the gamut of blue washes that designers seek for their lighting plots. Integral to the new Selador Vivid lineup, Fire and Ice offer these rich, lush colours while equalling or exceeding the brightness performance of conventional tungsten PAR fixtures and saving dramatically on electricity.
In a typical colour application, Fire and Ice fixtures produce more light and consume less than 70 watts of power compared to their gelled tungsten counterparts at 575 watts. Changes in LED technology have also prompted ETC to upgrade its popular Vivid fixture to the new, more eco-friendly Vivid-R, which provides much higher light output than the original - a stunning 50% increase - while consuming 10% less power. And because of the low heat output of all Selador Series LED fixtures, Vivid-R's colours can be blazing without overheating the talent, says the company.
One of the latest major uses of ETC's Selador fixtures in Europe has been - appropriately - at the COP15 climate change summit in Copenhagen in December. As a close to the summit, world leaders were invited to a performance of the August Bournonville ballet Napoli at the Royal Danish Theatre. In among the theatre's house rig of ETC Source Four Revolutions and Vari-Lite VL3500Q moving lights were Selador Vivid and Lustr. Vivid handled sidelight and cyc lighting, while Lustr illuminated the set pieces.
"When we first started planning the show," lighting designer Mikki Kunttu explains, "we talked a lot about how to make the production as 'green' as possible. We even considered getting rid of conventional lighting completely, but this proved to be impossible. Using LEDs for sidelights was something new for me, and they worked really well. I was very impressed.
"I had been sceptical, because until now I'd considered that neither the dimming nor the power were quite there yet. But the Selador fixtures were fantastic, with the colours especially good. We had no problems whatsoever with dimming."
Selador is designed specifically for theatre use, to provide flattering skin tones, making the colours in costumes stand out and skin look natural. Even in the deep blue shimmering sea of Napoli's Act II, skin tones still do not appear unpleasant or harsh as they can with other LED fixtures.
Thomas Bek Jensen, the theatre's head of lighting, adds, "The theatre is funded by government grants and has a huge power bill which we'd love to reduce as much as possible. We are hoping to get funding to change all our outdated and inefficient equipment as soon as we can, which will enable us to save a lot of money each year."
(Jim Evans)
