USA – No sooner had Fresno’s Live Light, Inc. taken delivery of 50 new Clay Paky Mythos fixtures than the company was sending them out the door to the 2016 California State Future Farmers of America (FFA) Leadership Conference. Mythos played a key role in the entertainment component of the annual conference where they upped the excitement quotient for more than 6,000 high school agriculture students attending the event.
Live Light, Inc. offers a full line of equipment sales and rental services as well as complete range of entertainment production services. It has a long history with Clay Paky products and acquired 50 Mythos hybrid spot and beam lights for its rental inventory.
“Mythos is very versatile, and rental inventories have to be somewhat timeless and cover all the basics of lighting,” notes Live Light CEO/president, Reggie Rush. “Mythos is a pretty darn good little wash light, spotlight and special effects light – all in one fixture. We took delivery of our order at 8 am and by 10 am we were programming them for the FFA conference.”
Live Light has worked on the FFA Leadership Conference for the past 20 years. FFA chapters across California select members to attend the exclusive event, which ultimately chooses six students to travel the world honing their agricultural skills and promoting California agriculture.
This year Live Light earmarked its new Mythos for the half-hour “pump up” recorded music sessions that preceded every general session. Mythos also lit the Monday night concert headlined by country music duo Thompson Square. The sessions and concert were held in the Fresno Convention Center’s Selland Arena.
“The pump up sessions were designed to get the kids fired up before the general sessions began every day,” says Rush. “Three or four weeks out from the conference the kids picked a different song to get the big production number treatment – with lights, lasers and video – at the end of each pump up session. So we had time to work out the songs with the laser and video content guys.”
The stage was placed in the round in the Selland Arena with a 32-foot cube overhead featuring giant video screens on all sides outlined in truss. An octagonal truss above the cube lit the stage; a smaller truss was flown inside it where the 48 Mythos were rigged.
The Mythos fixtures helped give the feel of a full-blown rock concert to the pump up sessions and enhanced the Thompson Square concert the night before the conference ended. “Mythos were part of the production,” Rush emphasizes. “When the video and lasers were going and the Mythos were on, the kids loved it! We didn’t expect the kids to be so responsive to the fixtures. But they were just as vocal about how much they liked the lights as they were about the lasers.”
Mythos supplemented the house lighting by washing the audience, too.
John Osborne was the lighting designer for the pump up sessions and Jeffrey Rush and “Jedo” Osborne were the programmers.
Live Light hopes to use Mythos on the upcoming Miss California pageant at the Fresno Convention Center’s Saroyan Theatre. “In the rental business we try to bet only on sure things, and so far Mythos is off to a great start,” says Rush.
A.C.T Lighting is the exclusive North American distributor for Clay Paky.
Francesco Romagnoli, Clay Paky Area Manager for North and Latin America, added, “Live Light is a great company and we’re thrilled to see them enhance their inventory with our fixtures.”