Dazzling the Eye
To me, most accent lights aren’t made to really illuminate any person or set piece. Their function is strictly to serve as eye candy, or to light the surrounding air with colorful beams of light. This thought process has been around for ages. Long before there were moving lights, we had accent lights. On television we would see light bulbs built into sets and lots of flashing signs, but no light beams per se. In the 1970s, the only smoke one usually saw on stage was from dry ice machines and the ever-lingering exhaust left hovering in the air from various pyro explosions. The first accent lights I ever noticed came from watching old boxing or wrestling clips on TV. To this day, lighting designers will hang what they called “beauty” lights on the truss. The standard beauty lights were a group of PAR 46 fixtures with medium bulbs in various colored gels. They would emit a sparkling flare of color that the cameras would catch as they panned the ring from a wide shot.
Strobe Effects
Perhaps the first accent light was the strobe fixture. These were actually invented in 1931 and were used to make movement on stage look like slow motion. If you turned off the other stage lights and set a moderate strobe speed on fixtures facing the act on stage, you achieved that old black and white effect similar to the movies Charlie Chaplin made before there was audio. In time, a company called Diversitronics built these great strobe units for stage work. People then took the strobe into their own hands. Peter Clark was an Irishman with a lighting company in the 1980s called Super Mick. I remember being fascinated when I saw what Peter did by taking the bulb cap off of a typical leko and replacing it with a Diversitronics strobe. Then he put some shroud around the rest of the strobe so one could only view the strobing beam through the hard-edged leko lenses. I stood in awe watching these beams on a Pretenders tour, shortly before moving lights came into fruition. Within years, I saw that Morpheus Lights designed a hard-edge moving light with a dedicated strobe function. The first time I saw a High End Systems Studio Color in a random strobe mode I felt giddy as a schoolboy. This was the coolest use of a strobe ever at that time. Now not a single arc light fixture is released without the random strobe capability. Strobes have gone from being capacitor driven spurts of bright light requiring vast amounts of amperes to new LED driven models that are ultra bright.
Collimated Beams
The ACL (aircraft landing) beam came into place in the late 1970s, and bands started to realize that smoke on stage could highlight the beams of light. Howard Ungerleider was an ACL pioneer, but his band Rush did not allow him to use smoke machines in the early days. But they liked pyro. So he would time the use of his ACL fixtures to segments of the concert when he had just set off flash pots of flame. I call ACL fixtures accent light because, 99 percent of the time, they are focused in groups of four in a fanned beam configuration. LD Jon Pollak is the only designer I have seen who uses ACLs as non-accent lights. He will take a bar of four and actually focus all of the beams at a musicians’ head. Thinking outside the box is one of Johns’ best attributes. If you point four Sharpys at a persons’ head these days, you may just gather some complaints from the artist about being overheated.
Collimated beams of light are nothing new, but Clay Paky seemed to lead the world in another direction when they came up with moving lights that were dedicated to just emitting cool tight columns of light. Their series of Alpha beam fixtures started this revolution, only to be surpassed by the most popular accent light of all time, the Sharpy. Many companies have followed in their wake, trying to emulate this technology. The Pointe by Robe has been called a Sharpy on steroids. Martin Lighting came out with a cool gizmo last year they call the “Quadray.” It’s an apparatus of lenses that one attaches to the end of the standard MAC III or Viper family. The added module splits the large beam into four smaller ones.
LED Pixel Mapping
Of course, accent lighting has been raised ten-fold with the bombardment of LED fixtures on the market now. At first these lights were touted as the new generation of wash fixtures. Small and bright, these things sprouted everywhere. You could put them in every little nook and cranny of a stage set and illuminate scenery effortlessly. But then High End came along with one of the highest profile bits of eye candy at the time, the ShowPix. A moving LED head, this fixture has a bunch of 3W LEDs aligned in a head with the ability to display animation. They had pre-canned effects built-in, or you could load your own into the fixture. With rotating peace signs and moving letters, they were on the cutting edge of this pixel driven world we now live in. Now HES has released the Shapeshifter — a fixture that has eye candy type pixel mapping as well as the ability to spread high-powered beams of light in various directions out of one moving head.
Every month I see a new accent light on the scene. The Ayrton MagicPanel 602 was last year’s favorite fixture. Had it been capable of zooming in and out, it would have been the premier wash light in the business (I think). It’s a square beam of light that can rotate 360° continually with its pan and tilt mechanisms. With individual control of each of the 36 pixels in the fixture, this became the premium accent light of the year. But that was so 2013. The game is never-ending. While other companies are busy trying to emulate the MagicPanel, Ayrton decides to develop something totally different.
A New Spin for Strip Lights
Strip lights are nothing new. They were primarily used to light backdrops and used as footlights to front light productions. But with the advent of LED technology, designers started using strip lights as accent fixtures. Running various dimmer chases and color peels, LDs aimed the lights at the audience to accent musical beats. Along this line, Ayrton developed my favorite new accent product, the MagicBlade. This fixture is basically a small strip light, however the end result is a spinning shaft of light that emulates a thin line of lights that can spin in all sorts of ways, emulating a spinning single line gobo.
The brightness of the recent LEDs themselves has enabled fixture manufacturers to come up with some fun toys that yield new looks limited only by the programmers’ imagination. Incorporating focusable moving LEDs inside of a moving head may just be the tip of the next generation of accent lighting.
