More details from A.C.T Lighting (http://www.actlighting.com):
NORTH CREEK, NY – No sooner did Creative Stage Lighting Co., Inc. take delivery of Clay Paky’s Alpha Spot QWO 800 ST fixtures for its inventory than they deployed eight of them for jam band moe.’s continuing U.S. tour.
“In the 800-1000W range of New Age automated spots, it made immediate sense to us to add the QWO 800 ST to our rental and production fleet with its competitive features and price point,” says Creative Stage’s George B. Studnicky IV. “Not only does the unit stand out from 1000W units, at only 800W it has a very sleek and compact design.”
He believes Clay Paky is “listening to clients and establishing themselves as the new premier automated brand in the U.S. while maintaining affordability and not letting brand-name pricing get in their way. With the success of Clay Paky’s Sharpy, you can imagine that the fault of overpricing may have been tempting to commit.”
Jason Huffer, lighting designer for moe., selected eight QWO 800 STs for the theater-size rig that accompanies the band on tour. “It’s not a huge production,” he notes. “They’re on the upstage truss and meet my needs for something lightweight, not too large yet with a great feature set.”
Huffer first saw the fixtures in an online video. “They sounded like a really cool mid-range fixture,” he recalls. “The wide zoom range and focus seemed great. Kevin Parsley also from Creative Stage Lighting had just demo’d them and liked them; we said we’d take them on tour if Creative bought them. So it was a perfect opportunity for both of us.”
Huffer finds the Clay Paky Dyna-Cue-Creator function for doing projection work “very intriguing.” Dyna-Cue-Creator simplifies programming with a special channel featuring sophisticated combinations of customizable multiple effects. He likes “the thought put into the fixtures’ software.”
He also says, “The wide zoom range and keeping gobos in focus while zooming is very important. The band does a lot of improvisation and it enables me to do a lot of on-the-fly stuff. I love it when the fixture does all the technical work for me. It’s really great!”
A.C.T Lighting is the distributor for Clay Paky in North America.
