Clay Paky Mythos Project for Queen and Country at the Tower of London

Twelve Clay Paky Mythos fixtures projected text and images onto the Tower of London in September as part of a star-studded charity event honoring wounded armed forces veterans.

The initiative was launched to raise awareness of the Haig Housing Trust, which offers housing assistance to ex-service people and the week culminated in a fundraising event, "For Queen and Country," to mark the charity's centenary.

London-based Lightning Events was tasked with projecting the messages onto the side of the tower, and specified the Mythos fixtures, rigging them in weatherproof Flight Domes around 30m from the tower walls and near to the moat.

Production manager for the event, Lightning Events' Tom Foster, says: "We liaised directly with the Haig Housing Trust for this project. Their initial brief asked to project along all sides of Tower, which would have been extremely expensive. We therefore devised a more economically viable alternative, which relied on the power of the Clay Paky Mythos fixtures. We had looked at other fixtures but the Mythos offers exceptional zoom. Some of the gobos we had were particularly text heavy, but using Mythos we could project long distances -- sometimes 50m -- with good clarity and clean sharp text."

Controlled by a Chamsys MQ60, Foster rigged most of the 12 Mythos fixtures pointing at the north and west walls.

"We knew we could cover a much wider area with a lot less kit using the Mythos -- and they certainly suited the budget!" Foster says. "It was a real privilege to be involved in the event and it's been very well received by the client and the public."

Lightning Events offers a full production service providing event lighting, event audio, AV, staging, set design, event furniture, and power generation and distribution facilities.

Mythos is a highly advanced form of hybrid light, the company says: a 470W-lamp spotlight, which produces a large light beam, featuring a zoom that ranges from 4° - 50° (1:12 ratio); and also an extraordinary beam light, allowing the designer to switch to a minimum fixed beam angle of just 2.5°. A large, very dense, 160mm-diameter light beam leaves the Mythos's front lens and remains parallel for its entire length even at great distances.

Mythos won many Innovation Awards of the Industry and has been used on an incredible amount of events, the company says, including the Sky Sports F1 Show, a commemoration of 25 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Six Nations.

Alongside the Mythos projections, portraits of wounded and sick servicemen, taken by celebrity photographer Rankin, were projected onto the walls of the Tower using 21k Panasonic WUXGA Projectors. This part of the visuals was managed by First Network.

MC of events for the Tower of London event was Carol Vorderman. In her capacity as first female Ambassador for the RAF Air Cadets, she says: "I'm delighted to have been invited to switch on this incredible illumination of the Tower of London for such a great cause. Haig Housing, through its fundraising campaign Coming Home, does inspiring and vital work getting our wounded heroes into a specially adapted home where they can begin to live independent and fulfilling lives again. These men and women have given so much to us as a nation, and it is an honor to help them in return."

Ambersphere Solutions is the Clay Paky distributor for United Kingdom and Ireland.