Beaches Resorts in the Turks and Caicos Islands offers endless activities for people of all ages not to mention convenient access to some of the Caribbean’s best beaches. Lighting designer Lisa Weinshrott Kimmel, of Sharp Edge Lighting Design, was recently brought onboard to design lighting for a theatre project at the vacation resort and found an Elation rig at her disposal.
Beaches Resorts pride themselves on offering a huge variety of activities for the whole family with the new theatre shows highlighting another component of the resort’s entertainment package. “This was a new installation for four shows at the Beaches Resorts’ outdoor theatre on Turks and Caicos,” Lisa explains. “The unique challenges presented by this outdoor venue and the multiple musicals performing simultaneously created an environment where reliable and versatile equipment was an absolute imperative. Importantly, Elation proved to me to be up to such a challenge.”
Entertainment production company Creativiva of Toronto produced four 50-minute family friendly musical shows for the resort’s outdoor theatre (Dolce Vita, Jungle Book Live, Alice in Wonderland and Treasure Island). The shows, also creatively managed by Creativiva, debuted on April 16, 2017, and are scheduled to run for the next three years.
Lisa designed lighting for each of the four shows using a rig that includes 22 SixPar 300 IP LED Par colour changers and 9 SixPar Z19 IP LED Par wash lights with zoom. The SixPars are bright and versatile full-colour Par luminaries with 6-in-1 RGBAW+UV LEDs, which allow for an expanded palette of colour choice, an important feature when designing four separate shows at once.
“My personal challenge was to come onto this project at a late date in the design phase, and work with these products to create these unique environments that fully engaged audiences from wide ranging demographics,” said the designer, who also served as lighting programmer on the project. “The challenge was to make all four shows look different with the given equipment. Elation’s flexibility and colour rendering was a terrific tool for this. I used the Elation lights to create the vision of the director of the musicals, while engulfing the audience in a world of fun and excitement each night.”
Also in the rig are 9 Platinum Spot III colour and graphics-changing LED moving heads, along with 3 Fuze Wash Z350, Elation’s new Par moving head with fully premixed colour looks and a lens face that appears as one colour instead of individual LED diodes. The only other lighting used is 10 Par Cans left over from the previous lighting system. Most of the lighting works from a 25-inch trim height with a few units at 10-15-inches.
Despite the mild tropical climate, the fixtures are still exposed to wind and rain and are especially vulnerable to downpours that hit the islands from time to time. The SixPar fixtures are IP65 rated and built to handle the elements but Lisa had to come up with a protective solution for the other fixtures. The solution was to cover the Platinum Spot III fixtures in base skirts while one Fuze Wash Z350 is protected under the architecture with two placed on the floor each show. “It will be a great longevity experiment for sure,” Lisa concludes.
