Individually a 4-degree RGBW beam is nothing. One hundred forty-four of them in haze is the lighting layer.
About the project
On either side of the video ceiling I hung 72 RGBW pixel dots, 144 total. Individually they are underwhelming: a 4-degree color-mixing beam with infinite pan and tilt, and that's it. Array them, put haze in the room, and they behave like pixel tape. One diode is a point of light. A grid of them is the show.
Profiles sat in the same line for texture: color wheel, gobos, prisms. RGBWA+UV washes covered floods, strobes, and blacklight. Everything was evenly spaced and mirrored so the room was one canvas, any angle. Fixtures hung on strut in pods. A pod was 12 dots, one LSM150, and three WFP12s. Two pods filled a universe. The layer ran on six. Power was 120 volt on the same 200-amp service as the dance floor pillars, on switched relays so unused fixtures went dark without touching the desk.
Straight runs down both sides of the room kept conduit cheap and fast. DMX was copper over CAT6 to Art-Net nodes in the rack. I kept every bit of processing on the ground. If the network died during a night, I wanted it in one place, away from the crowd.
The HVAC duct on stage right was not on the drawings. It sat in the path of the last strut run. I put a gradual angle on that pod to clear the vent. It framed the stage better than a straight line would have.
Gallery
