Lighting designer Miguel González, of Madrid-based Colorcode Studio, chose the new Vari-Lite VL10 BeamWash fixture to enhance his design for the Mexico leg of Spanish star Enrique Bunbury’s recent world tour.
Running since 2017, the Expectativas tour was Bunbury’s most ambitious production to date. As show designer, González’s task was to convey the themes of the Expectativas album to the audience, within an innovative and original visual design. “For this type of tour,” he explains, “with great visual and technical demands, we must have a guarantee of quality, so that all the demands of the show are fulfilled every night. The lighting fixtures are a fundamental part of that, they will mark the quality of what the public sees. The fixtures should always work like on the first day.”
As well as quality and reliability, González looks for versatility from his lighting fixtures. “The more options the fixture has, the more it can offer to the show and, consequently, to the audience. In this type of show, you have to offer the most innovative and most visually impactful solutions.” With the new VL10 BeamWash, González has found answers to each of his needs. Its class-leading array of visual effects tools, from its rotating gobos to its beam reduction options, dual overlay prism and exclusive VL*FX animation wheel, give no end of options for creative variety.
“The power of the VL10 is well above similar equipment,” he said, “and the zoom I consider to be extraordinary. The uniform luminosity in the beam and colour mixing remains perfect, even in a zoom of such a range. I also like a lot the ‘drawing’ and gobo animations available.”
He adds, “I needed a very versatile fixture, because there are occasions in the show that I need to ‘draw’ a scene with a beam or a very defined gobo, and other occasions when I need to bathe a large surface with light, while playing with backlight and very fast changes of scene. I needed to have all this together in a single fixture and the VL10 has been perfect in this regard. They have met my expectations of 100%.”
