Lighting Designer Fredrik Jönsson of Eyebrow Designs AB used 30 Claypaky Mini Xtylos HPE fixtures to illuminate Supercell’s annual joint tournament for the Clash of Clans World Championship and the Clash Royale League World Finals at Clash Fest, held at the Helsinki Expo and Convention Centre. During the epic gaming event the best squads in the world battled for titles in a live esports environment as games were also streamed worldwide.
Clash of Clans is a free-to-play mobile strategy video game developed and published by Finland-based Supercell. The game is set in a fantasy-themed persistent world where the player is a chief of a village; game play tasks participants with building their own village using resources gained from attacking other villages with troops.
Jönsson explains that the tournament’s set design by Sami Ylikahri and Jonathan Maxwell did not feature the usual “wham-bam esports lighting with lots of beams, contrast and huge LED walls,” but instead “looked more like the environments existing in the games, so the lighting needed more of a natural look and feel.”
Jönsson kept that in mind as well as the need to have proper key light on the players and hosts in all the various positions on set. “It was a big room and had a huge entrance for the spectators to access the set, so I needed a lot of lights just to fill the space as well as lots of fixtures to enhance all the details in the set.”
He points out that “as in most e-sport events, there were blue and red ‘sides’ playing each other, so I needed a fixture that could produce a narrow intense beam with these two primary colors being as bright as possible.”
He selected 30 Claypaky Mini Xtylos HPEs, the small form factor fixture with Claypaky’s innovative and proprietary RGB laser source. “I opted for Xtylos first, since I had worked with them before and knew what they could deliver in terms of intensity, but there was an availability problem. So, the supplier, Creative Technology Finland, asked if we could switch to the Mini Xtylos HPEs instead.”
Jönsson positioned the fixtures in a long row above the large center LED wall to achieve a roof of colored beams over the entire set. He found that “considering their extremely small footprint, the punch they delivered was just crazy! And the color rendering for the primary colors was nothing short of stunning. Since I needed bright primary blue and red, I would say the fixtures somewhat outshone themselves.”
In addition, he says “the fixtures have a great prism effect, which we used in white for some jingles in and out of the game matches and also for the grand winners with big ballyhoos and such.” Jönsson reports that, “the Mini Xtylos HPEs performed amazingly – I was truly impressed with the size and output ratio of these little fixtures. Also, we experienced no fails or breakdowns during the 10 days we had them in use for the production.”
Working with Jönsson was Lighting Operator/Programmer Danne Persson. Jussi Sibelius was the Technical Producer for lights and screen and Otty Tyyskä the Assistant Technical Producer.
MSONIC Sound & Vision is the Claypaky Distributor for Finland
Further information from Claypaky: www.claypaky.it
