Clay Paky’s Sharpy lighting fixtures emit an amazingly bright light beam. Due to some serious optical engineering, they have developed a way for a 200W light bulb to blind you if you look straight into it. I’m talking retina damage. These things will auto-close your head’s personal shutters in record time. They come with a disclaimer. They actually tell the buyer that their fixture will burn holes in fabrics. That the beam emitted from this light will burn a performers skin. Right. Who’s going to believe this jargon from a 200W fixture? Well, now we are being tempted. Being rock ‘n’ roll guys, a few of my friends decided to take it upon themselves to test the Sharpy’s disclaimers. Sure enough, if you put one of these three feet from a sharks tooth scrim, it will melt a light beam-sized hole through it in five minutes. Impressive. Next they put a Sharpy three feet away from a Spanset, those cloth and fiber slings our industry uses constantly to attach heavy trusses to the rigging motors. It took 55 minutes, but the Sharpy melted the Spanset into some goo.
Nook Schoenfeld, from “LD-at-Large,” PLSN, May 2012
