Claypaky fixtures used to light...

Claypaky Mini Xtylos HPE Fixtures Are a Winner at Supercell’s Clash Fest e-sports Tournament in Helsinki
Lighting Designer Fredrik Jönssonof Eyebrow Designs AB used 30 Claypaky Mini Xtylos HPE fixtures to illuminate Supercell’s annual joint tournament for the “Clash of Clans World Championship” and the “Clash Royale League World Finals” at Clash Fest, held at the Helsinki Expo and Convention Centre. During the epic gaming event the best squads in the world battled for titles in a live e-sports environment as games were also streamed worldwide. “Clash of Clans” is a free-to-play mobile strategy video game developed and published by Finland-based Supercell. The game is set in a fantasy-themed persistent world where the player is a chief of a village; game play tasks participants with building their own village using resources gained from attacking other villages with troops. Jönsson explains that the tournament’s set design by Sami Ylikahriand Jonathan Maxwelldid not feature the usual “wham-bam e-sports lighting with lots of beams, contrast and huge LED walls, ” but instead “ looked more like the environments existing in the games, so the lighting needed more of a natural look and feel. ”Jönsson kept that in mind as well as the need to have proper key light on the players and hosts in all the various positions on set. “It was a big room and had a huge entrance for the spectators to access the set, so I needed a lot of lights just to fill the space as well as lots of fixtures to enhance all the details in the set.”

He points out that “as in most e-sport events, there were blue and red ‘sides’ playing each other, so I needed a fixture that could produce a narrow intense beam with these two primary colors being as bright as possible. ”He selected 30 Claypaky Mini Xtylos HPEs, the small form factor fixture with Claypaky’s innovative and proprietary RGB laser source. “I opted for Xtylos first, since I had worked with them before and knew what they could deliver in terms of intensity, but there was an availability problem. So the supplier, Creative Technology Finland, asked if we could switch to the Mini Xtylos HPEs instead. ”Jönsson positioned the fixtures in a long row above the large center LED wall to achieve a roof of colored beams over the entire set. He found that “considering their extremely small footprint, the punch they delivered was just crazy!  And the color rendering for the primary colors was nothing short of stunning. Since I needed bright primary blue and red, I would say the fixtures somewhat outshone themselves. ”In addition, he says “the fixtures have a great prism effect, which we used in white for some jingles in and out of the game matches and also for the grand winners with big ballyhoos and such. ”Jönsson reports that, “the Mini Xtylos HPEs performed amazingly – I was truly impressed with the size and output ratio of these little fixtures. Also, we experienced no fails or breakdowns during the 10 days we had them in use for the production. ”Working with Jönsson was Lighting Operator/Programmer Danne Persson. Jussi Sibelius was the Technical Producer for lights and screen and Otty Tyyskäthe Assistant Technical Producer.

Claypaky Sharpy Plus Aqua Fixtures Open the Flood Gates on Gwar’s Fall 2022 Tour
Heavy metal band Gwar recently wrapped the fall North American leg of their “Black Death Rager World Tour,” in which Claypaky Sharpy Plus Aquas played a key and unusual role. The tour marked the third for Nick Drakeas the band’s Lighting Designer; he is also a Light Technician with Richmond, Virginia’s Lite-Tek Entertainment, a lighting rental and production company which supplied the fixtures. Lite-Tek has a history with Gwar, which also hails from Richmond, having worked with them multiple times over the years, including providing lighting and studio space for the band’s 30th anniversary live stream from Lite-Tek’s warehouse during the COVID pandemic. Gwar’s fall tour kicked off at the Blue Ridge Rock Festival in Virginia in September and concluded in Baltimore in November. Sharpy Plus Aqua fixtures add an IP66 rating to the award-winning Sharpy Plus platform, making the moving heads perfect for outdoor events and challenging environments that call for beam and spot luminaires in a single, flexible package. A Gwar tour, as fans have come to expect, is a very challenging environment indeed. “Massive amounts of liquids are used in the show, ” says Drake. “ We went through three 30-gallon tanks of water every night for part of the show. I had four Sharpy Plus Aquas upstage and two downstage in the splash zone, but all six were consistently soaked. All of them really needed to be protected against water. The Sharpy Plus Aquas, with their IP66 rating, made perfect sense.”

Drake explains that on previous tours he used only strobes on the ground, but he was eager to bring out spots this time. “They had to have an IP rating and they had to be robust enough to withstand two months on tour. Lite-Tek’s acquisition of Sharpy Plus Aquas at the start of the tour was perfect timing. ”The tour featured music from the band’s 2022 album, “The New Dark Ages,” which gave a different vibe to the show, Drake notes. “The new music is a lot more dramatic and demanded big looks and moods instead of super hard-core strobes. With just six Sharpy Plus Aquas as my spots I could create giant, sweeping looks and movements for the new music and weave in their old style, too. I used the fixtures in new and unique ways to make really cool scenes for every song. ”He found that the versatile fixtures enabled him to create big looks as well as intimate settings. “I could single out characters in a very character-driven show. For ‘Rise Again’ I was able to focus on slowly building an intimate scene of two characters sword fighting with the spots defining the look of the characters on the sides without usingany other fixtures. I could really highlight them and make a small, intimate space on the stage for them. ”In contrast, “Berserker Mode,” at the end of the show, featured a 10 x 7-foot alien monster and flying intergalactic fluids. “The spots let me create really big looks for this scene no matter if we were playing in a small club or at the Blue Ridge Festival, ” Drake says. “And the IP rating was a necessity here. “I liked how the Sharpy Plus Aquas meshed with every rig I had, no matter what the stage,” he continues. “They were never too overpowering or underpowering. They’re just like Sharpy Plus but waterproof!” Drake says the fixtures will be his “number one choice for Gwar in the future. The band loved them. They made the band look good in every scene and let them do what they wanted with their performances without worrying about the lights.”

“Nick created a great show in one of the most challenging stage environments you can imagine. I’ve been a Gwar fan for years, so it was special to be partof his production. The added benefit is that we now know for certain our fixtures are protected from intergalactic fluids –something we hadn’t effectively been able to test for in R&D,” adds George Masek, Strategic Marketing Managerfor Claypaky.

Claypaky Fixtures Light Inaugural Event at Lusail Stadium for FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022
Lighting Designer Matthew Tunchon and Qatar Vision Production Company WLL (QVISION) utilized a large Claypaky rigto light the first test event for FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 inside the newly built Lusail Stadiumin Doha, which hosted the tournament’s final match between France and Argentina. The event marked the official unveilingof the World Cup uniform for staff and volunteers. Since the soccer pitch was being prepared for the final match, the ceremony’s attendance was limited to 25,000 people but the event had to feel big in size and scope. “Executive Producer Dan Boltonand Creative Producer Tom Davies both from Dubai-based BE Experiential, expressed the need to make this event fill out the stadium,” says Tunchon of Silver Bullet Projects in Sydney, Australia. “The production designedby Nathan Heverin needed to work around the pitch and be quite compact, so it was up to the lighting to really give the event a big arena look. ”To help achieve that, Tunchon assembled a rig featuring 50 Claypaky Scenius Unicos, 40 A.leda B-EYE K20s, 25 Sharpys and 30 Hepikos. “We used the B-EYEs in the seating area behind the stage to provide some great effects and to backlight the performance stage,” Tunchon explains. “The big face of these fixtures as well as the huge amount of looks you can get out of them meant they were really great at helping to pull the stage out from its position in front of the seating area.”

Along with the B-EYEs the “real star fixture” at the event were the Hepikos beam-wash lights, he reports. “Their brightness, colors and speed were great, but when this fixture goes into beam mode it’s a whole other light. With 30 positioned on either side of the stage as well as in the middle bowl these beams really stood out amongst everything else we had in the rig. ”The Scenius Unico spots did the majority of the work when it came to providing key light to the stage as well as to performances that took place on the field of play, according to Tunchon. “Their great output as well as their shuttering capability were really put to good use,” he notes. The complement of Sharpy Plus fixtures was used to create a ring around the upper stadium. “Their punch and fast responsiveness worked well with their ability to zoom into a nice tight beam for some aerial effects then flood out to light lower levels of the audience, ” Tunchon points out. “It was a great fixture to have access to. ”Overall, the lighting designer was impressed with the wide array of Claypaky fixtures and their ability to work well together. “It was really good to see how uniform the Claypaky equipment was,” says Tunchon. “The colors were very consistent across each fixture type, and they were all very reliable in the extreme weather conditions they operated in at the stadium.” QVISION supplied and installed the lighting equipment to BE Experientialfor the orientation event. This included all lighting, rigging and AV control equipment. They also supplied technical crew and operation staff. With Silver Bullet Projects, Clinton Seerywas the event’s Technical Directorand Aaron Russthe Programmer.