Road Test: Strong Technobeam, page 40 - PLSN.com

What makes club lighting work? Energy! The
visuals in the room should match the energy
of the music.
There’s no single way to do club lighting right, but there are lots of ways to do it wrong.
Simple contrasts in colors can have more impact than complex, busy effects.
control of the speed and many fixtures lack
a “random” setting. Other options include
fanning an effect on the strobe channel
(and assigning a speed group if your board
allows) or building a stack of cues with
shutter on and shutter off to run as a chase.
Some fixtures have a lamp effect that looks
similar to the strobe chase, but the jury is
still out on whether that significantly shortens
the lamp life. To be on the safe side, stick
with the shutter chase since the effect is not
that much different — at least not enough
that drunken people would notice.
Mixing and Wheeling
Consider yourself lucky if you have fixtures
with both color mixing and a color
wheel. Color mixing gives you a much greater
range of color, but a fixed color wheel allows
you to snap between colors, create half
colors, or do color spins. If your wheels don’t
snap (and this goes for gobo wheels too), try
building cues in four steps. First, open the
shutter in color one. In the second step, close
the shutter and change to color two. The
third step is to open the shutter with color
two, and the fourth step is to close the shutter
and change to color one. The resulting effect
is a heavy color bounce, especially if you
have light and dark colors or colors on the
opposite side of the color wheel. A bounce
works well to keep a beat, while spinning the
color wheel adds an extra punch of energy
on a long build up.
Spinning or Not Spinning
Most fixtures now have at least two
wheels with gobo patterns in them somewhere.
The second set may be hiding on
the effects wheel or even in some cases,
(mysteriously), on the color wheel. Two different
wheels make layering fun and you
can create some unique effects by combining
gobos. But remember, your audience
will be steadily progressing towards
an inebriated state where they can’t walk
a straight line, much less look at one. To
get your message across, it’s best to keep
it simple. Beams work better for club lighting
than break ups. Break ups are generally
too busy to register, and sometimes
they’re so busy that it becomes difficult
to tell when they’re rotating. Cones and
single solid lines are some of the most
effective gobos, but fancier ones are fine
too. The same suggestions for color wheels
also apply to gobo wheels.
Where Have All the Scanners Gone?
There are two types of automated
lights; those with moving heads, and
those with moving mirrors, or scanners.
The industry seems to be dismissing
moving mirror fixtures in favor of moving
heads, probably because moving head
fixtures have a greater range of motion.
But a good rig has an equal number of
both moving head fixtures and scanners.
A moving mirror fixture allows quick,
Ad info:http:// www.plsn.com/instant-info
2008 MARCH PLSN 31