Ronan Keating toured with thirty-two VL3000 Spots and 27 VL3500 Wash supplied by Chameleon Touring Systems. Lighting designer Neil Trenell used a simple three truss rig designed to cater for a wide variety of venues from state theatres to arenas in Australia and New Zealand and to make load in and out easy due to several back to back shows.
"The VL3500 Washes are great - very, very bright and deliver a great beam effect that compliments the other lights in the rig," commented Trenell. "The VL3000 Spots are just a really nice light and you get a great gobo out of them, they're ideal for the theatre environment that we're trying to create."
Eight VL3000 Spots were situated on the floor, the back truss held a further seven plus eight VL3500 Washes, the mid truss held eight VL3000 Spots and seven VL3500 Washes whilst the front truss housed eight VL3500 Washes and seven VL3000 Spots.
Roxette's lighting designer Calle Brattberg is using VL3000's on their current Australian tour and he had the following to say, "The reliability and accuracy of the VL3000 Spot's optics and zoom are ideal for achieving the diversity of moods the Roxette set demands. The ability to rotate a gobo smoothly, really slowly or zoom out to max and maintain the same focus are some of my favourite features."
Roger Waters bought his Wall to Australia in a show originally designed by Marc Brickman with lighting director Mark 'Sparky' Risk on the tour. PRG supplied the tour with the circular screen above the stage rimmed with twenty-four Philips Vari*Lite VL3000 Spots and 12 VLX Wash units used across the stage floor. Eighteen VL3500 Wash units are used on six vertical torms stage left and right.
"The sidelight torm lighting is my signature," says Brickman. "It creates a dimensional palette to get lines of light in a horizontal way like cutting with a knife. People look beautiful in that lighting."
Rod Stewart's lighting designer Mark Payne has been using VL3000 and VL3500 fixtures for years and the recent Australian tour was no exception with 22 VL3000 Spot, 25 VL3500 Washes and eight VL6c in the rig supplied by PRG.
"The quality of the beam across all the lamps is really important for me," said Payne. "I rarely use smoke or haze so evenness of field on edge and focus across lamps is important. The new VL3500WASH lights are great."
For the current Rod Stewart tour the Vari*Lites are distributed fairly evenly across the rig although Mark likes to rig in odd number groups such as three's or five's.
Taylor Swift kicked-off her Speak Now tour in Australia this month with a lighting design by Baz Halpin who once again relies heavily on the Vari*Lite VL3000 Spot and VL3500 Spot luminaires. The rig was supplied by PRG.
(Jim Evans)
