Chauvet meets challenge of Warrior Conference

USA - When the Events United team first saw the venue for the Warrior Conference in Waterville Valley, NH, they knew they had to push their design to the next level. The low, sloping ceiling of the Waterville Valley Ice Arena, where the event took place this May, is anything but conducive to creating the kind of dynamic lighting displays that were needed to reflect the spirit of this popular men’s conference. Compounding the task was the arena’s strict prohibition on rigging from the roof, which made the task of getting the adequate trim height for potential lighting even more daunting.
The team met this challenge by building their lighting rig from the ground up. Helping them was a collection of Chauvet Professional fixtures and LED video panels.
“Supporting all the lighting from the floor limited how much gear we could send up and how high we could go,” says Tim Messina, owner of Events United. “We needed to choose fixtures that were lightweight, yet powerful for our ground-up rig. We also wanted ones with a low profile, combined with beam angles that could give us the coverage we needed.
“Ryan Lane, our lead lighting designer, and I chose Chauvet lights to give us the look we were striving for while being very bright. Working them in concert with our PVP X6IP video tiles allowed us to create something eye-catching and exciting, despite the obstacles we faced.”
Anchoring the lighting rig were eight Maverick MK2 Wash fixtures. The team hung the RGBW LED movers on the downstage truss across the width of the stage
While the Maverick MK2 Wash units provided the front wash and eye candy, a collection of eight Maverick MK2 Spot fixtures, arranged on the upstage deck, were used to create full production-level aerial effects. Also engaging the audience and revving up the energy level were eight STRIKE 4 multi-formatted fixtures used as crowd washes and blinders. Half of the STRIKE units were flown on the downstage truss, and half were hung one-unit apiece on four upstage columns.
Adding colour and dimensionality to the stage were 13 Rogue R1 Wash fixtures and 11 COLORado Solo Battens. The Rogue units were positioned on ladders and placed behind the drum riser to create a brilliant wall of back light, while the batten units were hung above the video wall.
Key to enlarging the visual impression on stage was a series of LED video wall columns made with 98 PVP X6IP tiles, designed by Jon Martell, Events United’s lead video engineer.
(Jim Evans)

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