“The sign of a truly remarkable product is that when you have it in your demo room, everyone who sees it falls in love with it,” comments White Light’s managing director, Bryan Raven. “EvenLED has certainly passed that test—it was specified for one show, and the demo rig we have has already led to it being specified for a second, and requested for a third. We think its potential is quite enormous.”
Created by Brother, Brother & Sons in Denmark, and distributed by MA Lighting, EvenLED is a modular wall of high-output RGB LEDs with wide-angle coverage that allows them to evenly light a back projection screen when positioned just 250-300mm behind the screen (the precise distance depending on the screen type). Each EvenLED tile is a 1m square that is just 71mm deep; each tile incorporates rigging allowing it to hang securely from the tile above, with power and data cables then being daisy chained through. Each tile contains sixteen individually controllable RGB LEDs, each with sixteen-bit control, giving EvenLED the smoothest fades yet seen in an LED product. “It is a remarkable new way of lighting cycloramas,” Raven notes.
EvenLED was brought to White Light’s attention by Rob Halliday for a new touring production of a show which can’t yet be named. “The design for the tour presented us with quite a challenge,” Halliday notes, “since the show has a cyc that has to appear in an enormous range of colours, patterns and wipes, but we’d been left with just 25 cm for cyc lighting. We spent a very long time exploring every possible option but nothing really quite achieved what we needed to achieve in the space available, until we discovered EvenLED.”
“It is probably the most remarkable LED product I’ve encountered. It solved our ‘impossible lighting challenge’ by working in the space available, and offers an enormous palette of colors from gentle tints to deep, vivid saturated colors with each point being individually controllable to give graduations or movement—and it has incredibly smooth fading, even at the very bottom end. All of this in a modular form that should be easy to set-up on each move of the tour and which, as a bonus, has relatively low power requirements compared to conventional cyc lighting techniques.” The show’s 13.5m x 9m cyc will be lit using just 63A of power, with the array controlled using the grid layout function on a grandMA console. Even before that show gets up and running, EvenLED will have made an appearance on a second show—solving another difficult cyc lighting problem for Rick Fisher on the Chichester Festival Theatre’s new production of The Cherry Orchard, creating a light-box cyclorama in a very limited space. EvenLED has also attracted interest from a number of other theatres and shows, including Guildhall School of Music & Drama's production of City of Angels.
“The addition of EvenLED—which we think moves cyc lighting into the 21st Century—to our rental stock is another example of White Light’s ongoing commitment to supplying lighting designers with the latest and best tools to achieve their work,” comments White Light’s hire & technical director Dave Isherwood, “Just as we did 20 years ago with the first Rainbow color scrollers, and did in the 1990s when moving lights first moved into theatre. However, EvenLED is not just a great lighting tool, it’s also an efficient one, with low energy requirements and lower running costs compared to other ways of lighting big cycs. We hope this will appeal to many other lighting users—we will shortly be announcing a number of events around the UK to allow lighting designers to experience EvenLED first hand.”