From the Lighting Insights monthly newsletter comes an awesome article for this February 2014 — Product Manager Anthony Chiappone talks about one of the Nexus family‘s lesser-publicized features, remote accessing!
Check out the article in this month’s Lighting Insights from CHAUVET Professional!
Here at CHAUVET Professional we often talk a lot about A-Market productions, whether it’s on an international tour, a worldwide televised event, or the like. CHAUVET Professional products, like the Nexus family and the Legend series, are all over the lighting industry in major productions every week!
Every day though, we know that a market segment that does unbelievable work on smaller budgets exists and flourishes, with ultimate creativity and a co-mingling of music and light that is every bit as entertaining as the biggest show. Case-in-point, check out this Brother’s Gow show from the Orpheum Theatre in Flagstaff, AZ. Check this out, it’s well worth the time, and the music AND lighting are kinda mind-melting! Lighting designer Matt Collier has been designing the lighting for Brothers Gow since 2010 — give it a look:
We talked to Matt just recently to find out what he was out there driving — we were proud to find out that Brothers Gow is using a mix of CHAUVET Professional and Chauvet DJ equipment to make an amazing show:
We asked Matt why he’s been using CHAUVET Professional and Chauvet DJ for so long, and his answer was simple:
I really enjoy using Chauvet for my fixtures as I feel they are a great light for the money you spend. I have had my Q-Spot 260’s for 3 years now and the only thing ive had to do is replace 2 LED diodes. Great lights at a great price!
Here’s to many more excellent shows, gentlemen!
This month in the CHAUVET Professional Lighting Insights newsletter, there’s an excellent article and video with the Life In Color lighting and production designer, Collyns Stenzel, about what his challenges were to bring illumination among the same energy level of Electronic Dance Music and paint guns and thousands of people.
A snippet from the article:
Speaking of your artistic side, your festival designs really make spectacular use of video panels and play them off well against intense beam effects. So, how do you achieve the balance between video and this super bright light?
“I’m using the Chauvet MVP 18 video panels for my Life in Color design. It’s a good thing the MVP 18 panels are bright enough to keep up with the lights. In fact they’re almost too bright to use with large format 1200w movers!
“A key to using videos successfully is to have a good relationship with your VJ. The VJ Max Troyak and I have to have a good working relationship to make it look good. Knowing when to let video take over and when to let lighting take over and who’s going to call the next color combo is all part of our delicate FOH performance. I don’t think that can be taught, it can only be learned through experience.”
Check it out! Collyns Stenzel sits down with CHAUVET Professional to talk lumens and loud music!
CHAUVET Professional in the news helping make good light!
CHAUVET Professional recently colored a private event at the University of Sydney, where Jay Productions event company used 32
COLORado 1-Tri Tour wash lights for a beautiful combination of moderns looks and traditional architecture. Here are a couple of beautiful shots:
The world’s biggest paint party meets LED lighting and video from CHAUVET Professional!
CHAUVET Professional presents an interview with Collyns Stenzel, lighting designer for the light, paint, and EDM party known as Life In Color. Touted as the “World’s Largest Paint Party,” Life in Color recently toured Miami, Florida with an amazing, mind-bending production featuring hundreds of CHAUVET Professional video panels, 45 COLORado Batten 144 Tour wash, and 4 Legend 1200E Spots.
Check it out!
We here at CHAUVET Professional care about the impact that lighting takes on the world as a whole. So does the Broadway Green Alliance, which is an organization that strives to better the impact that the Broadway lighting environment has on the world and the consumption of energy.
We’re very proud to announce that not only is the Greener Lighting Guide out, but that CHAUVET Professional is a part! We strive to make the world a better place with light, and we’re glad to be part of an initiative that we believe in wholeheartedly.
Check out the Broadway Green Alliance’s Greener Lighting Guide here!
NEW from CHAUVET Professional, two excellent additions to the COLORado line!
Meet the COLORado 2 Quad Zoom Tour and the COLORado 2 Quad Zoom VW Tour — here’s Product Manager Ben Dickmann to talk a little about the two fixtures. Ben?
The COLORado 2 Quad Zoom Tour:
The COLORado 2 Quad Zoom VW Tour:
Digging through the Lux Laboratory here at CHAUVET Professional, we discovered some original Rosco Prismatics gobos. Of COURSE our initial thought was “Hey! Let’s stick these in an Ovation E-190WW!”
The results were great, they were so crisp and colorful! Check it out!
What a beautiful scene — from Valparaiso, Indiana’s prestigious Valparaiso University comes a story about LED ellipsoidals performing above and beyond for the sake of worship and beauty, inside of the Church of the Resurrection on the Valpo campus.
From the press release:
Valparaiso, IN – With a soaring roof that’s distinctively shaped like a nine-point star, Valparaiso University’s Chapel of the Resurrection is a fabled landmark to passing motorists on nearby U.S. Route 30. By some accounts the largest collegiate chapel in the U.S., boasting a 98-foot high circular chancel, the 55-year-old structure is also “big” in terms of the interior illumination challenges it presents — which is why Jeff Hazewinkel, Director of the Center for the Arts at the Indiana university, specified CHAUVET Professional’s award-winning Ovation E-190WW LED ellipsoidal for a recent lighting upgrade to the facility.
The Ovation E-190WW units made their debut in grand fashion, illuminating the 2013 Valparaiso University Christmas Concert, a beloved musical tradition in the community for more than 80 years. Attended by some 2,500 individuals, the concert featured the Valparaiso University Chorale, Symphony Orchestra, Chamber Concert Band, and Women’s and Men’s Choirs.
Lighting up both an event and a venue of such exceptional stature presented the Ovation E-190WW with a big role to fill – literally and figuratively. Along with its nearly 100-foot chancel, Chapel of the Resurrection has an expansive nave that extends 58 feet high and 193 feet in length.
“The lighting requirements for the event were two-fold,” said Hazewinkel, “one, to provide the musicians and choir with sufficient lighting for their performance, and two, to enhance them to the audience. Also, the addition of accent lighting creates visual interest.”
Hazewinkel said he chose the Ovation E-190WW “due to its light output and cost effectiveness,” as well as its extremely low power draw compared to ellipsoidal fixtures with conventional lamps. “One of the greatest challenges in lighting this space is the lack of sufficient distributed power for traditional lighting dimmers and fixtures. The (Ovation E-190WW’s) LED technology enabled us to light the performers in a way that would simply not have been possible using traditional fixtures without major infrastructure changes to the 55-year-old facility.”
The winner of the 2013 WFX New Products Technology Award, the Ovation E-190WW is a warm white ERS-style fixture, powered by 19 x 10-watt 2,960K LEDs. It produces a high-quality flat, even field of white light and features 16-bit dimming resolution for smooth fades. The fixture includes standard beam shaping shutters and a gobo/effect slot, and it is compatible with industry standard lens tubes.
Hazewinkel used 20 Ovation E-190WW units to light the performers at the Valparaiso Christmas Concert, hanging the fixtures in the facility’s north and south galleries, with additional front lighting provided from a position in the west gallery. Since the units were at a distance of about 165 feet from the performers, 5° ETC lenses were used to focus their beams.
“The lights performed extremely well; the color was even and true,” said Hazewinkel. “The performers remarked on how the lights enhanced their performance.”
Chauvet lights also added a dash of color to the event. The company’s CHAUVET-DJ-branded COLORrail IRC multi-color LED strip lights were used as wall warmers, on the acoustical shell and to provide color all around the stage. “I have several COLORrails in my inventory,” said Hazewinkel, “and I find them to be bright, great color, and easy to position.”
Hazewinkel, who has designed lighting for more than 75 theatrical productions, as well as concerts, corporate and athletic events during his 17 years at Valparaiso University, said he plans to add more Ovation E-190WW units to Chapel of the Resurrection in the future. Because of its large seating capacity, “the chapel serves a variety of roles,” he noted. “It is regularly the site of University convocations, commencement ceremonies and special lectures, as well as performances by instrumental and vocal ensembles. We will be bringing in additional Ovation E-190WWs as we continue to update the lighting systems.”
Today is a day of remembrance for a horrible tragedy that took place on this day, January 28, back in 1986. The shuttle Challenger, carrying a seven soul crew, exploded due to a faulty rubber seal on one of its booster rockets. All seven of the crew were lost that day, including a first in the world of education — Christa McAuliffe, a payload specialist on the mission and a high school teacher by day. Christa is remembered, as well as each of the other members of the Challenger crew, on a great history page from Nasa:
The last member of the crew was Sharon Christa McAuliffe, the first teacher to fly in space. Selected from among more than 11,000 applicants from the education profession for entrance into the astronaut ranks, McAuliffe had been born on September 2, 1948, the oldest child of Edward and Grace Corrigan. Her father was at that time completing his sophomore year at Boston College, but not long thereafter he took a job as an assistant comptroller in a Boston department store and the family moved to the Boston suburb of Framingham. As a youth she registered excitement over the Apollo moon landing program, and wrote years later on her astronaut application form that “I watched the Space Age being born and I would like to participate.”
McAuliffe attended Framingham State College in her hometown, graduating in 1970. A few weeks later she married her longstanding boyfriend, Steven McAuliffe, and they moved to the Washington, DC, metropolitan area so Steven could attend Georgetown Law School. She took a job teaching in the secondary schools, specializing in American history and social studies. They stayed in the Washington area for the next eight years, she teaching and completing an M.A. from Bowie State University, in Maryland. They moved to Concord, New Hampshire, in 1978 when Steven accepted a job as an assistant to the state attorney general. Christa took a teaching post at Concord High School in 1982, and in 1984 learned about NASA’s efforts to locate an educator to fly on the Shuttle. The intent was to find a gifted teacher who could communicate with students from space.
NASA selected McAuliffe for this position in the summer of 1984 and in the fall she took a year-long leave of absence from teaching, during which time NASA would pay her salary, and trained for an early 1986 Shuttle mission. She had an immediate rapport with the media, and the teacher in space program received tremendous popular attention as a result. It is in part because of the excitement over McAuliffe’s presence on the Challenger that the accident had such a significant impact on the nation.
The crew of the shuttle Challenger (OV-099):
We here at CHAUVET Professional encourage you to take a moment to remember those loved and lost in the Challenger disaster.