Clay Paky Mythos Fixtures Make US Debut at "Illumination: The Lights at The Morton Arboretum" EventOnce again suburban Chicago is aglow with the holiday spirit as "Illumination: The Lights at The Morton Arboretum" opens for its annual run, November 21 - January 3. Visitors to The Arboretum follow a magical one-mile paved path lined by trees that shine with LEDs and respond to touch and sound. Clay Paky Sharpys and new Clay Paky Mythos fixtures--the first in the US, the company says--housed in Igloo domes and programmed on grandMA2 consoles, provide lighting effects for the holiday display. A.C.T Lighting, Inc. is the exclusive North American distributor of Clay Paky lighting and MA lighting. The Morton Arboretum was founded in 1922 by Morton Salt magnate Joy Morton whose father inaugurated Arbor Day in the US. The annual "Illumination" event features lighting effects along a one-mile outdoor path through the trees and offers opportunities for visitors to interact with the trees to change the color and intensity of the lights. Intelligent Lighting Creations (ILC) in Chicago was already on site testing elements for this year's "Illumination" display when A.C.T Lighting brought some new Mythos fixtures for ILC and Lightswitch to look at. The Mythos hybrid light serves as a 470W spotlight with a large beam and zoom optimized for focusing, as well as a beam light, which remains parallel for its entire length even at great distances. Mythos also offers a completely redesigned indexed visual effects disc. "We did a shoot out in The Arboretum for lighting designer John Featherstone of Lightswitch, and he loved the brightness and the zoom of Mythos, as well as the rotating gobos and prisms," says Matt Pearlman, senior account executive with ILC. "There were a couple of key feature areas where Mythos made a much bigger impact than the Sharpys. So we decided to purchase a handful of Mythos units and use them for this years' 'Illumination' display." ILC is already planning on adding more Mythos fixtures to their growing Clay Paky inventory of Sharpys, Sharpy Washes, B-Eye K20s and Alpha Profiles. The Arboretum wanted this year's "Illumination" display to be "bigger and better" than the one staged in 2013, which met with great visitor response, the company says. "So we're growing the experience from last year," Pearlman says. The new Mythos fixtures are mounted in Igloo domes and illuminate custom water features in the Meadow Lake. "They have more punch and more functionality for the show, including the ability to zoom in and out and go even bigger with the prism effect," says Pearlman. Forty-eight Sharpys are mounted in a combination of Igloo domes and custom built ILC domes. "They're lighting the trees and creating aerial patterns for the show," he says. "The brief from The Morton Arboretum for the project was for guests to 'see trees in a different light,'" added project lighting designer and creative director Featherstone. "So we are always looking for new fixtures to support our design in interesting and unexpected ways. The Mythos offered us an unmatched combination of an incredibly bright, pencil tight beam as well as remarkable zoom range and gobo capabilities--we simply had to have them and ILC and A.C.T moved heaven and earth to get the fixtures to us in time, and we added them to LED B-Eye's for a flexible and versatile palette of fixtures." Dennis Conners and Benjamin Roy crafted the lighting programming using three grandMA2 light consoles with pre-visualization from MA3D. The show is controlled from multiple grandMA2 on PC's and MA Nodes, which are scattered around The Arboretum. "All of our consoles are from MA," Pearlman says. "The grandMA2 has become the console of choice for programmers and lighting designers alike. The reliability and ease of networking has become something we depend on for large scale events, and this show was no exception. Plus, we always get great support from MA and A.C.T Lighting." Featherstone says, "I can't remember the last time I designed a show that wasn't on the MA control platform. The combination of cutting edge technology, exemplary support from Will and the rest of the A.C.T team, and their willingness to always help us push the boundaries of what is possible makes MA the only real choice for us." Joby Benoit is the lead system's technician for "Illumination: The Lights at The Morton Arboretum." He was joined by a crew of over a dozen technicians that spent almost a month loading in this event. For more information on A.C.T Lighting, call 818-707-0884 or visit the link below. See Clay Paky at PLASA Focus: Orlando, February 17 - 18, 2015. 
|
