LONDON – Philips Vari-Lite is backing up the introduction of its VL4000 Spot fixtures with fixture-specific training sessions. One of these recent workshops took place at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) led by Coral Cooper, a veteran Vari-Lite trainer for EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) customers. There, the VL4000 Spot luminaires were disassembled to the sub-assembly level to demonstrate ideal maintenance techniques. Cooper also explained the VL4000 Spot luminaire’s broad range of features, informing the end users and potential customers at the session on how to use them to their advantage.
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Among the attendees was James Ashdown, Director at Automated Ltd.
“The VL4000 is a multi-featured fixture, with all the tools a lighting designer needs in one,” says Ashdown. “I’m very pleased to see that Philips Vari-Lite has included a four bladed shutter module into the fixture without losing any other features. I know this will be particularly popular with my clients and will improve my own designs.”
Also there to get up close and personal with the luminaire was Bianca Mastroianni, a freelance lighting technician working in the UK on Fringe theatre and Australia on large musicals and festivals.
“I’ve been working with Vari-Lite products for five or six years and wanted to know the manufacturer-recommended way of maintaining them,” says Mastroianni. “I’ve really enjoyed the training today – it’s been very thorough and in depth so was definitely worth coming to do.”
Andy Allen, who works at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada, agrees:
“The VL4000 training was the icing on the cake in a week of hands on Vari-Lite learning. There’s been a lot of talk about it so to be able to see one and then take it apart was a definite bonus. Our theatre venues have very limited space when it comes to hanging lighting fixtures but we run three light-heavy shows, both musical and traditional, in rep for a six month season. A multi-featured tool like the VL4000 could potentially solve this issue and bring a new palette of features to our lighting designers. It would work as a quiet tool for our productions and a feature-rich workhorse for our musicals, which is very attractive.”
“The VL4000 Spot is the market-leader in versatility,” says Coral Cooper. “It has inbuilt framing as well as an iris, not to mention all the gobos you could want, with prism divergence and multi-dimensional animation wheels, all whilst being extremely user-friendly. It’s bright and powerful, and it can be run in a very quiet mode making it perfect for studio and theatre applications. It’s basically a lamp for all seasons.”
For more information about the next training session, keep an eye on the Vari-Lite website at www.vari-lite.com
