So I get this call from Upstaging Lighting last week. They want to do a demo of their vast array of equipment to their clients during the Christmas time. They have asked me to put together a system that shows off the latest lighting and video toys they own.
This is like an early xmas for me. They have given me 150 seconds of time code to some U2 song and a bunch of new toys. I start with a big wall of Martin's new video panels. I separate it into 4 walls that are
roughly 20' tall by 6' wide. In between them I hang rows of Mac 300 LED fixtures, 96 in all. I will run all these elements thru one of thier Martin Maxedia video servers.
I map the moving LED heads to the media server with simple pixel mapping. It takes less than a minute to designate each of the moving light heads as one pixel of the video playing on the video panels. Now when I play a video from my maxedia, the lights and walls all mimic it together. I control all this thru a Maxxyz console.
For more video, I have 100 hi def versatubes lined up on the floor like a picket fence. Interspersed with them I have a bunch of Color blasts as well as some of those new Martin Stage bars. These stage bars are just too cool. They have 5 cells of LEDS with RGBAW colors that can chase in a variety of cool ways. These elements will all get fed video thru a catalyst 4 system. Again one can map the various LED products to the pixels of a video stream. These I run from a hog3.
Lastly I have them hang a white drape in front of the lights and videos with some kabuki solenoids to drop it on cue. I hang 2 High End DL2's about 230' from the drape. I will start the segment by showing what these babies can do for about 30 seconds. I show the lights as 2 separate projectors, them move them and collate the beam into one big image covering the whole front scrim.
Now onto the lights. I hang a 60' section of curved truss. On this I place 6 Little Big lites from Martin on the outside ends. I then hang some HES Showguns in the center of them. This will show clients the distinct difference betwwen these two extremely bright fixtures.
Next I grab some ribbon lifts (dmx-able of course) and hang 2 Coemar Infinity washes on them. Place some Atomic strobes on there as well and adjust the trim heights for different segments of the demo.
Lastly I take some truss pods from old tours and fill them with a splattering of Martin fixtures/LED products and different strobes.
The whole thing takes about two days and 10 techs to build and make working. I script out a page of cues for the song, making sure there is a cue about every 5 seconds. Each cue will show off something cool that each light does.
The whole segment takes me about 4 hours to write. Then I add the timecode to the cues and we are off and running. The demo looks impressive, all the lights and video perform effortlessly and everyone was happy. But I was probably the happiest because I got a chance to lay with all the latest and greatest lighting toys for x-mas.
