Dandenong’s Drum Theatre hosts 170 performances for over 85,500 patrons each year including professional touring productions, local theatrical performances and community events. The theatre has gained a reputation as an excellent venue for dance productions and hence its lighting rig reflects that fact.
The theatre has been gradually upgrading to an all LED lighting rig and recently they replaced their aging wash fixtures with ShowPRO R3 LED Wash and also added Prolights EclProfile CT+ fixtures. The EclProfile CT+, with its six-colour, LED engine and high CRI of 97, was designed and engineered to render the subtle differences in skin tones. It features a custom LED array designed to provide a rich colour spectrum to accentuate costumes and highlight set pieces.
Chris Le Miere, Technical Supervisor, reports that they conducted a shootout with several other LED Profile fixtures, some being ‘ridiculously expensive’ and some being cheap.
“The Prolights fixtures sell within that middle range of price,” he explained. “We put them up against Profiles that were in a much higher price bracket and, to be honest, the optics were a lot better in the EclProfile CT+ than some of the gold competitors. Ultimately we narrowed it down to three models, then we discussed the pros and cons between those three and the EclProfile CT+ came out on top.”
As a result, 20 x EclProfile CT+ with fixed 19 degree lenses were chosen and, upon using them for the first time, Chris says that he didn’t realise during the shootout how bright and punchy they actually were.
“They’ve also got a really nice colour range in them,” he added. “Usually you have red or blue that is quite weak, but these are quite punchy. They also have great natural whites and do a very good job of imitating tungsten.”
With the ShowPRO R3 Wash, Chris particularly likes the wide lens saying that they have a 6.5 metre throw in the venue and one R3 can wash a third of the stage. The fact that the beam can then go from 60° to a narrow 4° makes the fixture very versatile.
“I also like how quick they are,” he said. “I do like the colours although I think the red, for us, is a little bit soft but because we’re at 20 in the rig it doesn’t matter.
The R3 features an RGB + Warm White LED engine and a large colour palette can be achieved from saturated bold colours through to subtle pastels and amazing gold and ambers. ASL Systems supplied the Prolights EclProfile CT+ and ShowPRO R3 fixtures.
