Demonstrating their ‘green’ credentials, ETC’s award winning Selador Series of LED fixtures received their first major European outing at the COP15 Climate Change summit in Copenhagen in December 2009. At the end of the summit, the attending world leaders were invited to the Royal Danish Theatre for a performance of the ballet Napoli by August Bournonville.
In among the house rig of ETC Source Four Revolutions and Vari-Lite VL3500Q moving lights – both chosen for their quiet operation – lighting designer Mikki Kunttu used Selador Vivid for sidelights and cyc lighting and Selador Lustr for lighting set pieces. He explains: “When we first started planning the show lighting, we talked a lot about how to make the production as ‘green’ as possible. We even considered getting rid of conventional lighting completely, but this proved to be impossible. Using LED for sidelights was something new for me and they worked really well – I was very impressed.
“I was sceptical until now because previously I’d considered that neither the dimming nor the power were quite there yet. But this time, they were fantastic, with the colours especially good. We had no problems whatsoever with dimming.”
Thomas Bek Jensen, the theatre’s head of lighting, continues: “For some time, the Royal Danish Theatre has wanted to become more power efficient and the climate change summit, when we would be on show to the most important people in the world, gave us a good opportunity to see what was available. With Selador powerful enough to light the entire cyc from bottom to top by just placing a row on the ground, pointing up, that meant the theatre could replace an entire wall of ancient 1,500W cyc lights totalling 100,000W with a single row of Selador totalling more like 1,000W.
“From the wings, the Selador fixtures were focussed just above the floor, so that the light was on the dancers’ bodies and not their feet. This was a pleasant surprise for many of them, because they are used to being blinded by the side booms so that they can’t see the floor. After initial curiosity about the lights, they were all very happy.”
Kunttu also used some ETC Source Four Revolution automated zoom profiles to help create an underwater scene in Act II. They came as part of the house lighting rig, and, he adds, “they are fantastic fixtures. Looking from a practical point of view, they’re really silent – in opera houses, noise from moving lights can be a big problem, so having a fixture which doesn’t make too much noise is a major positive point for us.”
ETC Selador Series consists of three fixture lines: – Paletta, Lustr and Vivid-R – all of which are optimised to different uses. They have a common feature: the patented x7 Color System which offers the broadest spectrum LED colour available and saturated colour brightness levels that can rival or surpass the outputs of tungsten lighting fixtures, but using up to 90% less power. Lustr is best for whites and skin tones; Paletta for soft pastel colours; and Vivid-R for strong saturated colours. Within the Vivid line are three models: the Vivid-R, and the new powerful twins Vivid Fire and Vivid Ice. As the names suggest, Fire offers warm reds, while Ice specialises in cool blues, allowing the user to move from afternoon to sunset or from twilight to romantic moonlit nights.
Selador is designed specifically for theatre use, to provide flattering skin tones, making the colours in costumes stand out and skin look natural. Even in the deep blue shimmering sea of Napoli’s Act II, skin tones still do not appear unpleasant or harsh as they can with other LED fixtures.
Thomas concludes: “The theatre is funded by government grants and has a have huge power bill which we’d love to reduce as much as possible. We are hoping to get funding to change all our outdated and inefficient equipment as soon as we can, because if we change all the equipment, we can save a lot of money each year.”
You can see the video of Mikki and Thomas talking about their use of Selador along with images from the show on ETC’s YouTube video library, which can be found at www.etcconnect.com/copenhagen