Lighting Designer Eric Price turned to Elation’s Proteus Lucius as the feature light of an all-purpose floor package for rock band Taking Back Sunday as they headlined the travelling Sad Summer Festival in the U.S. in July.
Serving as the bands Lighting Designer, Programmer and Operator since 2017 Price had used the Proteus Lucius before on a tour with Mastodon: “The Proteus Lucius is great technology with a lot of features and you don’t lose anything with it being IP rated,” Price explained. “It makes no feature compromises and is just what you would expect from a professional moving fixture.”
Proteus Lucius leads the Proteus line of weatherproof luminaires. At 33,500 lumens and loaded with features, it houses a CMY colour mixing system with variable CTO and 5-slot colour wheel and can be used as a profile, beam or wash light, reducing the need for variant fixtures.
“It’s a solid fixture in every category but here’s the silver lining – there are ZERO downsides to the fact that it is weatherproof,” stated Jason Reberski, CEO at Chicago-based JRLX), lighting vendor for Taking Back Sunday’s Lucius floor package.
“The Proteus Lucius is lightweight, compact, and super quiet. It is perfectly useable in an opera house, an arena, an outdoor festival, or a movie shoot. The IP65 rating is simply a bonus that makes it even more versatile. It really is a ‘do-all’ fixture,” Reberski commented. Taking Back Sunday’s flown package for the Sad Summer shows was supplied by LIT Lighting out of Tempe, Arizona.
Price explained that for the Sad Summer tour the band wanted a more theatrical design feel, allowing them to move to different positions during the show. The result was a more streamlined stage that featured a series of risers that the band could move between on stage. Besides the drum riser, a 20 ft wide by 4 ft tall upstage graded riser acted as both a performance platform and runway leading down to a four-by-four midstage vocal riser with dual staircase.
The Proteus Lucius rode on four quick-to-deploy, custom set carts that butted up to the runway riser, a seamless height connection that Price says made it look as if the fixtures were on the riser but were just upstage of it: “There was enough depth to the stage that I could just clear the risers but could come down through the band without going right into the front row,” Price emphasised. “I could do low intensity beam looks into the audience from there or point them up over the crowd and into the sky.” The Lucius fixtures also flanked an illuminated set piece, a custom LED neon sign of the band’s logo that would emerge between the set carts.
Being an outdoor show with haze difficulties due to the elements, he often had the fixtures narrowed down for ambient-busting, eye-catching beam looks. “It’s sometimes hard to pull off a show in the elements with the wind and ambient light but the Lucius held up just great and really punched through,” Price noted.
Price took advantage of the multi-functionality, often accessing the Lucius’s three gobo wheels, to complement special effects like low fog. “There were some looks I was really happy with as the low fog came through the risers on to the band,” he explained. “Here I pointed the Lucius down into the fog for some fun beam effects, breakups, flower patterns and other great looks. I love the classic cone gobo and had fun making some split color wheel cone looks or two-tone laser-etched beam looks. Other times I zoomed the fixtures out for wide washes or prism looks, and I even used them glowing at low intensity for eye candy.”
Another aspect of the Lucius the designer found impressive was the fixture’s speed. “Being a rated weatherproof light, I was impressed with how quick they are, the pan/tilt, the optics and things like that. They were very responsive and friendly to work with programming wise.”
Of course, doing outdoor shows in grilling heat and never really knowing what the weather will be like, the Proteus’s proven IP65 rating was also a key factor in its choice: “They sat out all day in the summer heat, up to 108 degrees for the Texas shows, with no issues to report.” Price concluded.
