Spiiders and Spikies spin webs across Australia
- Details
Peter Rubie has spent the last 11 years devising a wide variety of lighting design work for different types of performances but specialises in productions that are a hybrid of classical and modern/pop/rock music.
His lighting ‘choreography’ requires an intimate and up-to-date knowledge of what’s available and how it can be used to achieve different effects. He often uses Robe products, distributed by specialist lighting and staging equipment suppliers, Jands.
Robe has released a number of LED products in the last year and having been a fan of Robe’s previous LED range, Peter was keen to get his hands on them. ‘I programmed a big private lightshow launch for Jands when they released the Spiider and Spikie into Australia earlier this year and knew instantly I wanted to use them on a show. Soon after, he received a very special project from Ministry of Sound Australia to create a lighting spectacular for a performance of Orchestrated at the Sydney Opera House.
Orchestrated was designed to re-imagine some of the world’s most loved dance-floor anthems with a live symphony orchestra and a group of Australia’s most talented singers.
“Tim and his team had strong ideas of what they wanted, but having worked with them before designing MOS Club, they also trusted me to create something to emphasise and accent the music,” Peter says.
“I also knew what the orchestra needed. You can’t be too extreme with the creative side of the lighting to the point where the musicians can’t see the music to do their jobs.”
Peter started with a centrepiece truss based on the Ministry of Sound logo to sit above the rear of the stage and filled it with Spikies. The show, with 772 timecoded lighting cues needed to flow with the orchestrations but also needed lots of tricks to accent the dance beats builds and drops.
“The Spikie for me is like every other micro LED beam fixture over the last year but on steroids,” Peter says. “The colours are mixed nicely before a single PC style lens so you don’t ever see individual LED smarties, it has a nice zoom range right from a parallel pencil-thin beam to a smooth even wash with a nice soft edge. Then there’s the unexpected. Robe have managed to squeeze in a three-facet prism, which looks great when breaking up the beam at narrow zoom as well as the unique flower effect which people simply don’t expect to come out of a fixture of this size.”
Peter’s real workhorse over the course of this year however has been the Spiider LED Wash from Robe. Orchestrated had 18 Spiiders, supplied by Chameleon Touring Systems along with the Spikies.
“The Spiider has a beautiful quality of light, at the right brightness. At the same time though, it’s very versatile and clever in that it incorporates the same ‘flower effect’ in its centre chip, so both types of lights work really well together.” “I was even able to use the Spiider as a side fill which it delivered with some nice pastels and then at times I could add the dynamic element of the flower effect seeping through the orchestra.”
(Jim Evans)
