"The Smashing Pumpkins are a powerful and dynamic band with big colourful lighting and you have to keep the visuals fresh," began Upton. "The proof with VARI-LITE is that the VL3500 Wash luminaires are once again my fixture of choice allowing the lighting to match the passion of the music. But then I was also looking for a new light that could provide our crucial front light color wash. I knew Philips Entertainment produced quality products so we took a look at the new SL BAR 640 LED luminaires and they are working great."
When production meetings first began for Shamrocks & Shenanigans Upton was searching for a new tour provider. To keep this tour fresh, he designed custom pyramid-shaped video walls and needed a custom truss structure to support them. He also needed two additional custom triangle truss structures to house his VL3500 Wash luminaires and it all had to be transportable around the world without needing a full breakdown.
With LMG on board, the custom truss structures and pyramid video walls, comprised of 18.75MM LED tiles, came to life. Now needing to add in the crucial color wash elements for the show, LMG also provided Upton with 24 VL3500 Wash luminaires. Wanting to now find a new fixture for his front light color wash, Upton turned to Philips Entertainment product manager Brad Schiller who showed him the SL BAR 640 LED luminaire.
"A lot of time and effort went into the design of the truss structures and Craig and his team at LMG did a great job," added Upton. "For the lighting elements, power and colour are essential to our storytelling and the VL3500 Wash gives me both the color and the power we need. For our front lighting, Brad showed me the new SL BAR 640 luminaires and we soon figured out their potential was only limited to our imagination. While I love how you can create the various effects with the face of the light, for our purposes of front light colour washing their color mixing is extremely beautiful providing any colour you can think of and the colour matching between pixels is seamless."
(Jim Evans)
