Hale Centre Theatre invests in zactrack
- Details
The larger auditorium, the Young Living Centre Stage, has a capacity of 911 for its dynamic in-the-round format and has recently invested in a zactrack SMART real-time tracking system.
The venue’s head of lighting and video, Jaron Kent Hermansen, was lighting a recent production of The Little Mermaid directed by Ryan Simmons, which involved extensive people flying, and decided that the time was right to purchase zactrack, which he could see would be a massive asset to this and other productions.
Jaron has lit several flying-heavy shows before and was never happy with various aspects of being able to light the scenes, especially when the shows were performed in-the-round, as was the case with The Little Mermaid. This presented a scenario where he wanted main character, the lively and assertive Ariel, to be constantly lit.
He had previously seen a demo by zactrack dealer Barbizon around a year before, when he had been contemplating using this very intuitive tracking system on a production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. He had also looked around at a few other options, before deciding that zactrack was the most appropriate solution for the theatre both for now and for future productions.
After this extensive research, Jaron and Hale Centre Theatre’s CEO Mark Dietlein reckoned the product would work very well for them, so the purchase of the zactrack SMART system complete with 20 trackers proceeded.
A typical show schedule might include up to four shows a day, so for The Little Mermaid they needed one set of live trackers with another charging/on standby.
The Little Mermaid’s 24 zactracked moving lights were a mix of High End SolaFrame 750s and SolaFrame Theatre fixtures. These were selected from the theatre’s house rig of around 120 moving lights and 350 other luminaires. The show featured 507 luminaires in total, of which those working with zactrack were essential to the show narrative.
The 12 overhead zactracked lights were rigged on two catwalks - centre and outer - with six fixtures in each position. The other 12 were deployed on the vom headers just above each entrance around the circular auditorium. The trackers were diligently concealed in various wigs and costumes.
“Utilizing zactrack enabled me to create numerous looks and scenes that would not have been possible without the tracking,” declares Jaron, explaining that he could isolate specific bits of the stage, and also achieve excellent follow spotting and key lighting from all angles, particularly during Ariel’s flying scenes.
Zactrack’s PSN (PosiStageNet) outputs communicating with four trackers were used to track lightning video effects from a disguise media server to Flotsam and Jetsam, the two ‘enforcer eels’ of sea witch Ursula.
Hale Centre Theatre’s house lighting console is an ETC Eos Ti and every lighting cue for The Little Mermaid also contained zactrack data.
