Multi Emmy Award-winning lighting design company Darkfire Lighting Design has found its 125 Claypaky K-EYE K20 and K10 HCR wash lights with LED light sources to be workhorse fixtures for an extensive roster of television shows, including the long-running competition series, The Voice.
Oscar Dominguez, Darkfire’s founder and head designer, remembers being impressed with the K-EYEs when he saw them in a demo. “We had been talking about HCR fixtures, and these lights didn’t have a lot of gimmicks: They were a straightforward, beautiful wash light—robust, bright, with exceptional color and without things we didn’t need,” he says. “They’ve been an excellent addition to our inventory and become a popular tool among our designers.”
LA-based Dominguez, who has been the Lighting Designer for The Voice since it premiered in 2011, thought the K-EYEs would “be useful on this program” and now deploys 38 K20s and 48 K10s on the show. “The K20s flank the upstage screen, and an array of K10s provide beautiful side fill and make strong statements in pieces when we want good beams in the air,” he explains. “When the show shoots reality pieces on the stage we also let them use the rig, and the K-EYEs act as key lights and provide upstage motivation for them.”
Dominguez likes to do a lot of pixel mapping, which Claypaky’s local support and Italian headquarters helped him achieve with the K-EYEs. “To use the fixtures in pixel mapping we needed them to be in a mode where they would listen in RGB for the media servers,” Dominguez says. “Claypaky was kind enough to write us special software that lets the K-EYEs run in RGB mode while still allowing us to utilize the full potential of HCR” for total control over the quality of all forms of white and colored light. Dominguez reports that the K-EYEs have been “rock solid” in their performance on The Voice with “no significant drift. And they all seem to match up nicely, which is great.”
The lighting designer has also used Darkfire’s K-EYEs on a number of other TV shows, including Shark Tank and a Bachelor special. “In terms of quality of light, the K-EYEs are a superior product. More people need to discover how good their color rendering is,” Dominguez concludes.
Further information from Claypaky: www.claypaky.com
