"Every manufacturer has their LED wash light that is slowly evolving and I first heard about the VLX just prior to its release," says Pen. "I was programming a show in the States when a Vari*Lite rep told me all about it so I was excited to see it nearly a year later. I placed one side by side with a couple of other LED wash lights and immediately I could see it was a 'game changer' - an evolution of the wash light. It's definitely a tool and not an effect.
"The approach that Vari*Lite seems to have taken is to replace the guts of what the wash light already is, what we've come to know and love. Wash lights have colour mixing, they generally have a dimmer that's separate from a strobe channel and they pan and tilt. It's that simple, you don't really need to get fancier and the VLX fulfills that role."
For the Linkin Park show Pen replaced all the normal wash light positions with VLX fixtures. The Vari*Lite VL*3500 wash fixtures are used as follow spots with four backlighting the band and six on the downstage follow spot truss operated manually.
(Jim Evans)
