Judging from the reception it's getting from Las Vegas nightlife reviewers, Light doesn't have to worry about living up to its name. Part Cirque show and part dance club with 38,000sq.ft. of space and a 35ft high ceiling, Light features acrobats spinning overhead and world-famous EDM DJs spinning up front. To add to the multi-layered sensory experience, video is everywhere; 6mm video panels line the club's massive walls, its ceiling and cascade downward to the DJ booth.
Lighting a space as large as this, where beams need to highlight performers on a vertical plane as well as a horizontal one, and where the lighting must integrate with and work around video wall surfaces, wasn't an easy undertaking, according to lighting designers John Lyons and Richard Worboys of John Lyons Systems. Adding to this challenge, the LDs were also asked to illuminate an adjacent 50,000sq. ft. outdoor Mediterranean-style pool/beach club area called Daylight.
To conjure up the extraordinary visual experience the owners had in mind, Lyons and Worboys chose Platinum and LED lighting fixtures from Elation Professional. Between the indoor and outdoor venues, more than 450 Elation products were used. On the inside at Light, this total includes 144 Elation Platinum Series moving lights (48 x Platinum Beam 5R, 44 x Platinum Spot 5R Pro, 12 x Platinum Spot 15R Pro, 12 x Platinum Beam 15R Pro, 28 x Platinum Spot 35R Pro). The high-power Platinums' bright beams thrust out in every direction, ricocheting off the club's video-covered walls and ceilings like the aerial acts themselves.
The Platinum Series utilises the advanced technology Philips MSR Platinum lamp, allowing the units to produce a very powerful output relative to a their compact size, and they're also very fast-moving - making them ideal for illuminating Light's cavernous interior, said Lyons.
"It's not only a very large space, it also has a very large volume of air space. This empty space is necessary for the Cirque performers to do their stuff in mid-air," explained Lyons. "So we couldn't have a lot of objects in the way. Yet we needed the lightshow to be able to fill the voids. So we had to use fixtures that produced very powerful beams and had the throw to fill that space, and were also able to move quickly with very smooth movement, as the Platinums do. If you're able to get enough of those in a space, then you can create some fantastic choreography in air."
The lights combine with the video surfaces to "create a third -never yet done - lighting effect," said Lyons. In addition to the LED panels, "there are also four high-power projectors that provide front surface projection on those areas where an LED panel was not possible. The content provided by Moment Factory was custom created and mapped to the irregular positioning of these surfaces. Used for media as well as a lighting fixture, the juxtaposition of these visual elements with the theatrical lighting creates a new sensory dimension."
One shining example of Lyons' and Worboys' creative combination of lights with video is their use of Elation's Event Bars - a 39" X-Y bar with 4 LED pinspot heads -- to frame the projection and LED screens in the main performance space facing the audience. The Event Bars "are slim and powerful so their home between the cracks of the video panels is inauspicious until they power on and blaze the room with a choreographed blizzard of beams," said Lyons.
Other Elation fixtures used in Light's interior include the Opti Tri White,
