"This was my eighth year with the event and every year is a new story to tell," began Crawford. "When looking at the lighting tools to use, I first look at each event space and how to best tell this story through light. For the evening's performance, I needed a fixture that could truly function in a variety of ways. I wanted it to act as a full stage wash in some of the softer moments, but then also have strong beam capability that could cut through a large rig for moments that needed more of an edge. When I saw the VL4000 Spot at a 4Wall demo a few weeks prior to the event, I knew it would be the ideal solution."
With his decision made, 4Wall New York provided Crawford with 11 VL4000 Spot luminaires. Throughout the week of load in and programming with the new 1200W fixtures, the VL4000 Spots continued to surprise him with each passing day.
Crawford explained, "One of the biggest challenges I often see with contemporary automated fixtures is there always seems to be an optical place of perfection and when you attempt things such as a zoom out or drop in a gobo you often lose the ideal optics. What I was surprised most by with the VL4000 Spot was that even zoomed-out with dark colours and texture, I was still able to maintain a great output. These fixtures had some serious headroom that I was able to call upon for a few 'wow' moments."
Crawford added, "The night of the show everything ran great and the rig performed flawlessly. One of the things I enjoyed most about the VL4000 Spot fixtures was that there were many moments where I actually needed to dial them back a bit so that they would better match the layering of the other fixtures. This left me the option to have the remaining 25% of output for when I wanted to open them up for a special effect. This gave me a reserve of sort for those special moments when I wanted the light to really push through. Often we have to run fixtures at full and don't have this last percentage in our pocket. It's an invaluable design tool."
(Jim Evans)
