When Oberon Productions, Inc. of Forest Falls, CA, got the call to supply some additional lighting equipment for the Biola Youth Theatre’s production of West Side Story, they introduced the Theatre group to the Zero 88 Fat Frog console.
"They had been using a two-scene preset board from ‘another manufacturer’ to run their conventional lighting rig," says Eric Strand, president of Oberon Productions. "A board with no cue stack is an abomination to theatre!"
Biola Youth Theatre is one of a select few youth theatre companies that work in partnership with a university; in this case Biola University of La Mirada, CA. The high school aged students are required to work both on stage and backstage during the course of the program. Part of this program includes running the lighting console for productions.
"The Fat Frog was great," remarks Strand. "I’ve always liked its features and how easy it is to learn; however, it was also easy enough for the students to learn, so they could be the programmers of the show as well as the operators."
As well as providing a Fat Frog console for the production, Oberon also supplied Color Kinetics’ Color Blasts and Color Blazes as well as a Reel-Efx DF-50 haze machine.
Oberon will be collaborating with the youth theatre group again in this summer’s production of The Wizard of Oz. "We are hoping to use some additional equipment for the summer production," comments Strand. "High End Color Commands are ideally what we would like and, hopefully, the new Zero 88 Frog 2!"
The Frog 2 has 2,048 DMX channels, a built-in touch screen and a powerful yet easy-to-learn operating system. Zero 88 products are distributed exclusively in North America by A.C.T Lighting, Inc.
For More Information:
www.biola.edu/community/theatre/about.cfm
www.zero88.com