Clearlight Shows OPEN DAY

On Wednesday July 30, lighting and staging hire and sales company Clearlight Shows threw open the doors of their Melbourne office and warehouse to current and prospective customers, plus the customers of the future, to show off their wares.

With big production houses, small theatre companies, LDs of every stripe, and a bunch of students from Melbourne Polytechnic dropping in, I attended the open house after dark, when the lighting fixtures could really show off what they can do.

Tastefully draped off in their very own Wentex drape system and filled with a nice haze, the busy warehouse presented nicely, divided into sections showcasing their brands and gear.

Lampy lighting consoles, Capture lighting software, Highlite Infinity lighting fixtures, and LDR followspots were the stars, but I really got intrigued by some lesser-known offerings.

The big news was the completely new Infinity Furion FX402 Bar, which was only released in Europe weeks before the event. Managing Director John McKissock ordered the unit on display the day they were available, meaning this was the first one to make it to the southern hemisphere. The Infinity Furion FX402 Bar is an IP65-rated LED batten with 10 high-power 60W RGBW LEDs in 10 tilt heads with zoom and 60 warm and cold white strobe pixel LEDs. It goes head-to-head with other big players in the market, and the LDs I talked to about it were very keen to get it on their shows. It is blazingly bright, and capable of some very, very cool effects.

The Infinity Furion P602 Profile with framing shutters was also getting a lot of attention.

It’s a lightweight, IP65-rated moving head with 600W flat-field LED with CMY + CTO colour mixing and colour wheel with 7 colours + open. It’s got a rotating gobo wheel with 7 gobos, static gobo wheel with 9 gobos, and rotating 5-facet circular prism. Zoom range is 6.5° to 56.6°.

The students from Melbourne Polytechnic were really enjoying getting hands-on with the LDR Astro 600 and Astro 250HP follow spots. I managed to walk across the beam and can attest they have extremely serious output, and can throw comfortably from the highest dome room in the country.

One of the lesser-known products that got my attention is the RSC Lightlock. which is a specialised motion-dampening system for moving lights which allows them to be rigged on very lightweight hanging or flown structures. Basically, it stops truss moving when the light moves. RSC stands for Royal Shakespeare Company, who developed the product years ago. There’s even a video online with Sir Patrick Stewart himself explaining how they work. Clearlight have been distributing them for years, and big companies like PRG and Resolution X have serious stocks of them.

I love finding out about small, niche things that have been invented to solve very specific problems. Highlite’s Mammoth-branded TerraFix spikes are definitely in this category – a range of stands that you can spike into sand, earth, even rocks, to mount lights on when you’re working outdoors. They are kinda threatening in real life – don’t make your LD angry!

Wentex are now pretty well known around Australia for their fantastic pipe and drape system, which even a sound guy like me can put up and make look good, thanks to their ingenious combination of telescopic supports and Velcro. But they also make all kinds of staging gadgets, including the Rapido curtain clamp. It’s a quick release clamp for hanging curtains off a bar, with nothing else to tie or fiddle with. It makes moving a drape from one fly bar to another incredibly fast, as it locks as soon as there’s weight on it.

Clearlight continue to surprise with the range and depth of the solutions they have in their range. I encourage anyone serious about their lighting to have a chat to the team and find out more about some of ingenious gadgets they bring into the country.