Proteus Lucius lights Sad Summer headliners
- Details
Price has been with Taking Back Sunday since 2017 and served as lighting designer, programmer and operator for the band’s Sad Summer set. He says he had used the Proteus Lucius before, on a tour with Mastodon, and knew the all-purpose LED moving head well. “The Proteus Lucius is great technology with a lot of features and you don’t lose anything with it being IP rated,” he said. “It makes no feature compromises and is just what you would expect from a professional moving fixture.”
Proteus Lucius, the compact brother to Elation’s popular Proteus Maximus, is an all-purpose fixture in the market-leading Proteus line of weatherproof luminaires. Abundantly bright at 33,500 lumens and loaded with features, it houses a CMY colour mixing system with variable CTO and five-slot colour wheel and can be used as a profile, beam or wash light, reducing the need for variant fixtures.
“It’s a solid fixture in every category but here’s the silver lining – there are ZERO downsides to the fact that it is weatherproof,” stated Jason Reberski, CEO at Chicago-based JRLX, lighting vendor for Taking Back Sunday’s Lucius floor package. “The Proteus Lucius is lightweight, compact, and super quiet. It is perfectly useable in an opera house, an arena, an outdoor festival, or a movie shoot. The IP65 rating is simply a bonus that makes it even more versatile. It really is a ‘do-all’ fixture.”
Taking Back Sunday’s flown package for the Sad Summer shows was supplied by LIT Lighting out of Tempe, Arizona.
Price says that for the Sad Summer tour the band wanted a more theatrical design feel, something that would allow them to move to different positions during the show. The result was a cleaner, more streamlined stage that featured a series of risers that the band could move between on stage. Besides the drum riser, a 20ft wide x 4ft tall upstage graded riser acted as both a performance platform and runway leading down to a 4 x 4 midstage vocal riser with dual staircase.
He adds that the Lucius were a good fit for the show and he used them consistently throughout the set for “a bit of everything”. Being an outdoor show with haze difficulties due to the elements, he often had the fixtures narrowed down for ambient-busting, eye-catching beam looks. “It’s sometimes hard to pull off a show in the elements with the wind and ambient light but the Lucius held up just great and really punched through.”
Of course, doing outdoor shows in grilling heat and never really knowing what the weather will be like, the Proteus’s proven IP65 rating was also a key factor in its choice. “They sat out all day in the summer heat - up to 108 degrees for the Texas shows - with no issues to report. I, however, tried to spend as much time as possible in the air-conditioned bus,” Price concludes.
