America’s love of Scorpions was on full display March 26-April 16 in Las Vegas where the German rock band played a string of shows at Zappos Theater in Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino. Dubbed “Sin City Nights” with special guests Skid Row, the three-week residency was lit by Austrian designer Manfred Nikitser, who handled production and lighting design, and also programmed and operated the show. He turned to Elation Professional’s Artiste Monet™ LED moving head as a workhorse fixture on the show.
An 18 x 9 meter LED screen backdrop meant that, in general, very bright fixtures were required. “We still wanted to have a light show with visible light beams,” Nikitser explains, “not just a video show where lighting is a side element. We wanted to meld these elements together without losing one of them so we needed very bright fixtures, as well as lights that had nice colors that could work well with the media content.”
While researching options that would work well for a floor lighting package, the designer got in touch with full-service lighting company Volt Lites of Southern California and quickly realized they could offer much more. “We needed a workhorse in order to get through a rock show like this and they reintroduced me to the Artiste Monet. It is a fixture I had used in Europe and was familiar with but one I had never used as my main lighting fixture. I didn’t expect the brightness to be honest and after taking a closer look, I realized it would work well for this show.”
The Artiste Monet is Elation’s multi-award-winning 45,000-lumen LED Profile luminaire with 7-flag SpectraColor color mixing system, endless rotation framing, and comprehensive FX package. Some 87 fixtures were used on the Vegas residency show: 64 in an eight-finger truss fanned out over the stage (eight per finger), nine for back lighting, and 14 as front light remote followspots. “The positioning of the moving heads was perfect, also the front lighting fixtures we used for followspots,” Nikitser said. “We could just move them a few degrees very narrow with iris medium and they would cover the entire stage. They were very exact and we had no issues or incidents where they lost their positioning. You can’t take that type of thing for granted.”
With trims of 9.5 to 11.0 meters over the stage and much longer from the FOH position, not to mention the ambient lighting from the large LED backdrop to fight through, the Monet’s 45,000 lumens were welcome. “The lumen numbers are one thing but I always look at how much punch they have when you put color in. Some fixtures then get quite weak but the Monet did really well.”
The designer accessed the fixture’s CMY+RGB SpectraColor color mixing system for some songs, for example when he needed a rich full red, but he also created a lot of looks using the six-position color wheel “because it has such nice colors and it worked perfectly for what I needed,” he said. “The zoom and color wheel are two important features that I think many manufacturers often underestimate but they were both quite good in the Monet.”
The “Sin City Nights” residency was a great success and reviews of the show were glowing, not only of the band’s performance but also the lighting and production design. Following the May 6 show in New York City, Scorpions play European dates through July 15.
Photos: Manfred Nikitser
