Intense Lighting has increased its Perseo count to 26 units now owning just over 200 moving head profiles/spots. Adding more EclProfile CT+ takes the company to 60 units and over 180 LED profiles.
“The Ayrton Perseo is a great workhorse with a bright and acceptable colour mixing system for theatre,” commented Ian Garrad, Director. “The IP rating comes in handy, it’s very much an all-rounder. It has a good feature set for the price and is a reliable fixture overall.
“The Prolights EclProfile CT+ have been a successful item for us. They are widely accepted as a modern-day lustr2 replacement. They are brighter and the built-in homogenizer is a big win. They offer good reliability and support plus their compatibility with existing accessories is key.”
Intense’s Perseo and EclProfile CT+ went straight out to Gilgamesh, a collaboration between Sydney Chamber Opera and Opera Australia. This world premiere was composed by Sydney Chamber Opera Artistic Director Jack Symonds and brought to life by visionary director Kip Williams.
The production was the first time that lighting designer Amelia Lever-Davidson has worked with Intense Lighting saying their reputation for supplying clean, well prepped and functioning gear was instrumental to the success of the design.
“I worked closely with Director Ian Garrard, who delivered a remarkable level of service and support to help get a large moving light package across the line,” she remarked. “The lighting hire for the show is on the larger side for a Sydney Chamber Opera production, and it was a relief to have a company like Intense behind us for the challenge.”
The set consisted of an 18m x 20m white tarkett, and Amelia’s key consideration was achieving a rig with uniformity of fixtures as well as flexible creativity. The project was working against some challenging time constraints with a short bump in, very little focus time and returning to any fixtures for focus touch-ups was going to be near impossible.
“For this reason, we decided to move forward with a design predominantly made of moving lights. The challenge around this was designing a lighting rig that, despite the significant quantity of movers, was quiet so as not to overwhelm the opera with the whirring of fans and other mechanical creaks and groans.”
Amelia wanted a mostly LED rig to achieve uniform beam consistency in an attempt to lessen any issues the lights might have interacting with the white floor. Trying to source enough of the same make of light and fixtures that were complimentary to one another proved the biggest challenge in the design process.
Gilgamesh traverses forests, ancient cities, The Palace Sublime, The Garden of the Gods, The Waters of Death. The audience sees great forests destroyed for lumber, a goddess sends down The Bull of Heaven to reap havoc and destruction on the city of Uruk, and a king seeks the meaning of eternal life on an island on the edge of the world. Classic Opera. With a mostly static set, the lighting needed to conjure these different worlds for the audience.
“It was certainly a challenge to make all of these disparate locations feel distinct from one another, but an excellent rig provided by Intense allowed us to build some beautiful stage pictures,” said Amelia.
One of the biggest challenges with the design was the size of the Bay 17 space, with the concern that most of the light wouldn’t have enough “oomph” to throw across a distance that large. Amelia reports that both fixtures worked well with the long throw distances and managed to still have some light coming out of them after shooting 25m across the space!
“The uniformity of the beam was also excellent in both fixtures which proved fundamental to lighting the white tarkett well,” added Amelia. “Gilgamesh was my first experience working with both of these fixtures. I used the Aryton Eurus earlier this year and found I liked the Perseos for similar reasons – their output is outstanding, they’re quiet, and the good optics and frost are also a plus. Achieving a good CRI can sometimes be challenging with the S Type fixtures, but overall, they are a very good LED moving head. I’d be interested in testing out the TC for CRI comparison one day.
“The EclProfile CT+ also worked well having better brightness than what you commonly can get out of LED Profiles. Their colours and CRI were also very good. The only disappointment was despite all the water, blood and mud in the show, we never got to put both fixture’s IP rating truly to the test!”
Also in the rig were Martin Encore Performances CLD, Martin Encore Washes Warm, ShowPRO Collider Strobes, Jem ZR45 and Look Solutions Cobra Smoke Machine.
