Clay Paky lighting and grandMA got rave reviews at the 15th annual Ultra Music Festival (UMF) in Miami's Bayfront Park where they added to the pulsating excitement generated by fans, DJs and electronic musicians under the tent-like Carl Cox Mega Structure. A.C.T Lighting is the exclusive distributor of both grandMA and Clay Paky fixtures in North America.
This year's UMF was the first two-weekend, six-day event in festival history and the most successful to date drawing over 330,000 electronic dance music fans. Over 200 DJs and electronic musicians and emerging artists performed each weekend. "This years UMF was incredible! We designed and built some amazingly complex and overwhelming environments that truly tested the limitations of technology," comments Stephen Lieberman of SJ Lighting. "The Carl Cox arena / Megastructure took things to a whole new level. We are extremely hard on equipment at these show for 12 hours a day - 6 days of events."
UMF also scored another first with the public debut of the Clay Paky Sharpy Wash 330 in the U.S. Fifty Sharpy Wash fixtures were featured in the innovative Cox Mega Structure, which was purpose-built for the high-energy festival to showcase DJs and artists on stage and shelter legions of dancing fans.
Clay Paky's Sharpy Wash 330 is a compact, lightweight 330W washlight, with the luminous efficiency, graphic and optical performance of a 1000W fixture. It is extremely silent and quick and is fitted with a complete CMY color system, special colors, 6.5°-48° zoom, mechanical dimmer, beam shaping filter and motorized top-hat. It is an eco-friendly light, allowing considerable running and consumption cost savings.
"My challenge as a designer is to match products with my designs that add balance to the system, adds Lieberman. "With the Sharpy's incredible output, this has not been an easy task to accomplish. 1500 watt fixtures have to run at full throttle to keep up. The new Sharpy Wash 330 has definitely met the challenge. I was extremely impressed with its output. The color mixing system worked flawlessly, giving me everything I demanded of it throughout the event - from the deep saturations to great, subtle hues. It was also quick enough to handle big color mixing effects, where lesser fixtures would have stalled. The small size of the Sharpy makes life significantly easier for the electricians to and it also makes for quite a fast pan and tilt."
The Sharpy Wash fixtures joined a complement of Clay Paky Sharpys, Alpha Spot HPE 1500s and Beam 1500s mounted in the Mega Structure's lighting system. The truss pods were controlled by 54 CyberHoist motors; lighting was controlled on a grandMA2 full-size console.
"Stephen creates a truly immersive environment not found anyplace else in a live music festival. Clay Paky's drive to create high output fixtures in a compact form lends itself to such an environment. The truss pods containing the Sharpy Wash moved to within 10' of the audience creating a highly dynamic effect. It was a perfect match for the Sharpy Wash," comments A.C.T Lighting's VP of Sales, Brian Dowd.