Clay Paky Sharpy Washes make their debut on The Logie Awards

The 55th Annual TV Week Logie Awards was held on Sunday 7 April 2013 at the Crown Palladium in Melbourne, Australia and broadcasted live on the Nine Network.

On request from Lighting Director Rohan Thornton, Clay Paky’s Australian distributor Show Technology rushed in the new Clay Paky Sharpy Wash 330 fixtures. The Sharpy Wash features a 6° to 50° zoom, CMY colour mixing, special colour wheel,  rotating beam shaper,  frost filter and a motorized top hat.. Weighing in at 19kg, the Sharpy Wash is as small as its brother, the Sharpy “beam”.

Rohan first saw the Sharpy Wash at the LDI show last October and he rated it the standout product of the show. “I thought they were brilliant!” he remarked. “The speed, quality of beam, quality of colour and all the features were amazing. They have great intensity, power efficiency, and of course Clay Paky colours are always fantastic. The Sharpy Wash is simply a really good, small light with a lot of tricks. It’s really versatile due to its beam range and beam shaping – a true multifunctional light.”

The Logies saw Rohan position the Sharpy Washes above the host set.  From there, along with Clay Paky Alpha Beam 700′s, they washed the stage during the musical and formed the core of the moving light rig. “The Sharpy Washes performed great, we had no failures and the spares are still covered in dust,” commented Rohan. “We found some really cool tricks to do with them such as beam chases and the consistency across the rig was phenomenal. The CTO was really nice on them too.”

As well as the thirty-six Sharpy Washes the rig featured eighty Sharpy Beams, sixty Alpha Beam 700′s, Martin TW1′s, Martin MAC Auras, MAC301′s and MAC101′s as well as 220 Pro Shop LED MulitPARs, GLP Impression X4′s  and Martin Fusion Bars.

Unusually, Rohan decided to use Clay Paky 1500 and 700 Alpha Profiles as key lights; a somewhat bold experiment that fortunately worked a treat.  “Traditionally I would key light using a tungsten based profile or something like that but the problem is that graphics are fundamentally created at daylight level so we never got really good clarity on shows at this venue,” he explained. “I decided to use the 1500 and 700 Alpha Spots but most arc lights are very difficult to colour correct. I discovered that Rosco could supply Permacolor filters and thought I could replace some of the colour corrections but of course modern moving lights have fixed wheels for their fixed colours. However we worked out that we could get some cut and made to go in the gobo slots. We ended up using the variable CTO and Permacolor filters to come up with a colour temperature of about 5000 degrees Kelvin. So basically all my lectern lights, back lights were either 700′s or 1500′s and that allowed us to do things like have a tight lectern or if there were a lot of people at the lectern we could expand the shutters out without changing the intensity. It worked really well and we certainly got some clarity out of the graphics that we’ve never had before.”

The main lighting suppliers for The Logies were Resolution X and PRG with Resolution X sub-hiring the Sharpy Washes from Chameleon Touring Systems. Lighting Lab and Clearlight also supplied a small amount of gear.