SOUTH AFRICA – Durban based rental company, Black Coffee, have purchased 12 new Clay Paky Mythos fixtures which will go onto the 14th Metro FM Music Awards for lighting designer François van der Merwe and Dream Sets, the official technical suppliers . The awards will be hosted at the Inkosi Albert Luthuli Conference Centre (ICC) in Durban on the 28th February and will be broadcast live on SABC1. Black Coffee will also be receiving six Stormy CC.
Brandon Bunyan, owner of Black Coffee, was introduced to the Projectors comprising of The Mythos, The Stormy and The SuperSharpy on the South African leg of the Clay Paky Roadshow held at the end of last year. Once Clay Paky’s Massimo Bolandrina and Giovanni Zucchinali had completed an indoor demo, they took the fixtures outside to do an informal outdoor demo. “I was late for beers at the demo,” remembers Bunyan. “It was night time and from a distance of 3km with ambience and lights in the area, I could see the beams and color of the Mythos in the sky.”
The fixtures were brand new and the bright beam surprised everyone including the Clay Paky team!
“Once Brandon had seen the demo, he knew he was onto something and immeditaly ordered The Mythos,” said Duncan Riley of DWR, suppliers of Clay Paky in South Africa. “He also ordered six Stormy Colors.” The units form part of an upgrade at Black Coffee.
Mythos is a highly advanced form of hybrid light. It is an excellent 470 watt-lamp spotlight, which produces an outstanding large light beam, featuring a zoom that ranges from 4° to 50° (1:12 ratio).
The light beam is sharp, with perfectly defined edges, from the first millimetres after the front lens right along its entire length. The zoom is optimized for focusing, which is separate from that of the fixed and rotating gobos. Its movements are smooth, fast and very quiet. Mythos also features a completely redesigned indexed visual effect disc, which may be superimposed on all the gobos, both in and out of focus.
But Mythos is also an extraordinary beam light, allowing you to switch to a minimum fixed beam angle of just 2.5°. A large, very dense, 160 mm-diameter light beam leaves the Mythos’s front lens and remains parallel for its entire length even at great distances.
The Stormy uses the latest LED technology but retains the charm of a classic strobe. The light source is a strip of powerful white LEDs, which emulate a bright Xenon linear lamp. The flash effect is actually enhanced since the Stormy is equipped with a parabolic reflector, like a class strobe, and does not project the light directly forwards like other LED strobes do. The frequency, duration and intensity of the pulse are fully digitally controlled, and these parameters are even independently adjustable, which is impossible with a xenon lamp strobe.
Thanks to its highly sophisticated electronics, the light turns on an off instantly, creating the jerky movement illusion. The time the light is on (the pulse duration) may be extended as required. Thanks to the use of LEDs, the light intensity remains absolutely constant, without flickering effect. The Stormy also comes with RGBW LEDs, which are able to flash in any color: there is no more need for gels, which dramatically reduce the amount of light, or slow noisy unreliable scrollers.