English Electro Punk band The Prodigy used 40 Claypaky Ultimo Sharpy fixtures for the UK leg of their continuing sold-out global tour. 4Wall invested in the fixtures specifically for the tour, sourcing them from Entedi, Claypaky’s distributor for the UK and Ireland. These luminaires were identified as perfect choice for the band’s shows.
Lighting Designer Tim Fawkes notes that The Prodigy’s music “is so high energy that it naturally lends itself to high-energy lighting. The band bounces off that energy you bring to the lighting rig and deliver more themselves when they feel that energy on stage.”
Interviewed during the Nottingham Arena show as the UK leg wrapped, he explains that his fixture choice matched the band’s performance requirements. “They need that speed and that brightness the Ultimo Sharpy has to offer,” he says. “We use 40 of them, and they are always present in the show framing the stage.”
Some especially key moments, however, are the start and end of “Roadblox,” Fawkes points out. “We put the linear and round prisms in with the breakup gobos and it just completely takes over and fills the space with light. It’s an awesome look that just fills the arena with beams. For the number of fixtures we have, the amount of light they output is incredible – you can’t beat it, really.”
He expected the Ultimo Sharpys to be fast “but not that fast,” he laughs. In addition, “the tilt range is incredible, and moving back to a discharge lamp was great, we get that intensity. Also there are quite a lot of greens in this show; sometimes I use the color wheel in combination with a bit of CMY to get the precise hue we need – the colors are really good.”
Fawkes was pleased with the versatility in looks he could achieve with Ultimo Sharpy as well. “We frost them up a lot; the combination of frost and prisms means you can make them look a bit like a wider spot. And that’s such a nice frost – they almost become like the old Sharpy washes: You get that nice diffused beam that’s still packing a punch.”
He enjoyed the combination of prisms too. “I don’t know how they managed to do the optics, but even when you put both prisms in you still get a considerable amount of light out of the front end,” Fawkes notes. “In ‘Out of Space’ we wanted ethereal beamy looks , and the prisms work great for this . With the prisms in you can go right down to the small aperture and it gives you a laser-like beam. Put the breakup gobos in there and you get beautiful shards of light through the smoke.”
The lighting designer reports that the fixtures have been “really reliable” with “no show-stopping issues.” He declares that he will “always come back to Sharpy as the only thing small enough, bright enough and fast enough to get what we want for the shows.”
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