TV lighting
designer extraordinaire Kasper
Lange was ‘blown away’ by the power of the Clay Paky fixtures used in
his highly efficacious lighting design for TV event of the year, Eurovision.
Denmark based Lange worked with
Eurovision’s creative director Per
Zachariassen to create a huge, structural lighting design that
complemented the show’s titanic ‘diamond’ stage. Lange crafted a clean,
architectural lighting look that allowed the angular stage to ‘open and close’
creating a dynamic mix of open and intimate lighting looks.
“The brief for the show can be summed up in
two words – big and simple,” explains Lange. “The contest was open to almost 40
different nations and each nation’s set needed a different lighting look. The
challenge for us was to make each song look unique but also to introduce an
organic flow throughout the show and not create a ‘mash’ of 37 songs.”
A crucial part of a much larger lighting
rig, Lange specified 178 x Clay Paky
Sharpy Wash 330 fixtures to frame the set’s giant 110 x 30 metre LED
back wall. The powerful punch of the Sharpy Wash added further definition to
the wall whilst reflecting the sharp lines of light that ran throughout the
Eurovision set.
“For this element of the design I wanted a
small but very powerful wash fixture to sharply frame the large back wall LED
screen,” continues Lange. “The Sharpy Wash 330 was the natural choice and in
fact it turned out to be the biggest work horse of the show. The fixtures are
just incredibly reliable, – throughout the entire two month production
period for Eurovision we didn’t have a problem with a single one, needless to
say I was totally blown away.”
In addition to the Sharpy Wash 330 Lange
specified 32 x Clay Paky Alpha Beam
1500s as part of the huge lighting package supplied by a collaboration
of Danish hire outfit LiteCom
and global production house PRG.
The Alpha Beam 1500 belongs to the
special category of fully automated ACL fixtures, in addition to its high
luminous efficiency (185,000 lux at 10m) the fixture also holds a powerful
effects engine for shaping and animating the beam for intense long distance and
mid-air effects such as those seen in Lange’s Eurovision design.
“Because we had a spider cam filming the
stage from above we couldn’t rig any trusses below 30 metres,” explains Lange.
“This meant we needed a fixture with a throw powerful enough to cover the whole
30 metres. PRG introduced Clay Paky’s Alpha Beam 1500s to me because of their
solid, super concentrated long throw beam. I was very impressed by the
fixtures, they were the perfect tool for the job.”
Austria won the 2014 Eurovision Song
Contest thanks to Conchita Wurst with the song “Rise Like a Phoenix”, and now
will organize the next edition of this great musical event.
Photo, @Ralph Larmann
