HES LED Sola rides high at RodeoHouston
- Details
LD Systems provided the gear for the nightly concert series during February and March at Houston’s NRG Stadium.
After each day of bull riding and mutton busting, with horses, clowns and kids kicking up the dust, the self-propelled stage steered itself to the centre of the arena for the evening’s performance with top name acts. This year’s new concert stage - designed and fabricated by Tait, with support from LD Systems - unfolded like a flower, revealing its five-pointed star shape.
The stage used vertical motion control for the star point stage sections and its rotating centre stage section. Its backdrop truss structure supported moving lights and motion controlled video modules.
Brittain positioned the SolaSpot 1000s above the backdrop video wall for rear key lighting to all the performers on the rotating stage.
“The SolaSpot 1000 was perfect for this application because it has a flat field with a great colour temperature,” Brittain says. “We needed something that wouldn’t draw a ton of power and didn’t have a huge profile,” he adds, making note of the 20,000 lumens from its Bright White LED engine, as well as its lightweight, compact form. “We got a lot of use out of the CTO wheel as well.”
Ten of the SolaHyBeam 2000s - a hybrid wash, beam and effects fixture - were positioned on the overhead lighting system. The flagship SolaHyBeam can outperform even the most powerful 1500W arc-source instruments.
“We needed a fixture to widen our wash with this year’s larger stage, specifically to fill in the base of the star points. We were trying to keep our power consumption under control but still get the punch in a wash that we needed – even with the frost in and zoomed out a good bit. The HyBeam 2000 did this, plus provided some other fun features. Similarly to the SolaSpot, I love the colour temperature and the even field is great.”
Brittain was impressed with how both fixtures read on camera, and raves over their reliability in the rig. “They just work; I certainly don’t have to worry about them come show time.”
This year, five of the RodeoHouston concerts each roped in more than 75,000 fans at NRG Stadium. Garth Brooks opened and closed the concert series, with total nightly attendance hitting 1.36m for this year.
(Jim Evans)
