Chapel Off Chapel is one of Melbourne’s most popular live performance venues. Housed in a former church, it presents a well-rounded programme of live music, cabaret, theatre, comedy, dance and visual art. The venue has hosted artists such as Coldplay, Foo Fighters, Tripod, and musicals including The Colour Purple, Rent and Blood Brothers. It’s also a main hub for Melbourne Cabaret Festival and Midsumma Festival.
The lighting rig already had LED MultiPars and ShowPro LED Fresnels and over the last few years the venue has been tracking the power consumption in the Chapel Theatre. This enabled them to make a proposal to the Sustainable Environment team at the City of Stonnington for the necessary funds to make an important change which will have an immediate impact on the carbon footprint of the venue. As a result, the venue now has 64 LED fixtures made up from new moving lights, profiles, fresnels and multipars.
“We’ve halved our power bill by switching to all LED,” commented Simon Prentice, Technical Supervisor at Chapel Off Chapel. “As our movers are all LED, you’re not having to strike them at the start of the show and running them at full for five hours, you’re only running them when you need them. I reckon there’ll be even more savings to come.”
For a wash light four Ayrton Meraks were chosen. This compact moving head has a 250W multichip RGBW LED source and Fresnel lens from 168mm, capable of producing 4300 Lumen and equipped with a particular optical zoom 10: 1 that allows an excursion from 7 ° to 70 °.
“Originally we had a complete Robe rig of two Robe ColorSpot 700, two Robe ColorSpot 250 Spot and four Robe ColorSpot 250 washes,” said Simon. “I was looking for something equivalent to replace the wash fixtures but in saying that, with the Meraks we got a lot more than we bargained for! They have a much better output for the same size fixture. The zoom is really good, especially compared to what we were used to, and having the ability to beam shape is great. They’re also super-quiet which is good.”
Four Claypaky Axcor 300 Spots, equipped with an LED white source rated at 180W and 7000K, were also added to the rig. They feature a CMY colour mixing system and a seven-slot colour wheel (including the CTO filter), alongside 17 gobos on two wheels. Of these, six are rotating dichroic glass gobos. However, silent running was the most important feature for Simon.
“They sit above our audience so they couldn’t be too loud,” he said. “We looked at some other products but they were a lot louder. Their movement, gobos, mixing system and prism are all really impressive and they are definitely the correct fixture for this venue. The output we get from such a small unit is amazing. It really is a complete all-in-one fixture, with a series of features that we would never have expected to find in a compact body like this one.”
Despite weighing in at just 20 kg and measuring at just over half a meter high, this projector incorporates a large number of features such as rotating prism, motorized iris, “soft edge” filter and linear frost flood, alongside a zoom from 8° – 40 ° – really everything that you could ask for from a spot moving head.
ASL Systems supplied the Ayrton and Claypaky fixtures.
