Paulett Academy is a high school and 6th form college on the outskirts of Burton on Trent in Staffordshire. It has a strong focus on specialising in the arts.
The Installation Brief
As with a lot of school halls up and down the country, the lighting and sound facilities have often gone untouched for decades, with many still operating the highly in- efficient Furse type halogen lighting from the 60’s and 70’s along with large power consuming dimmer packs to control what often are damaged or non-existent lighting fixtures. Even if spares were still available, it’s not viable to get these changed due to the high maintenance and safety aspect of doing so. The control boards also are very antiquated and not user friendly, especially when trying to encourage students to take an interest.
The Solution
With all this in mind (a familiar story!) we set about working on a modern, easy to use solution for both lighting fixtures and control. Originally, the hall had a total of over 40 fixtures, not including the strips of on- stage down lighters. All of these required removing. We utilised as much as possible of the existing trussing, etc, and also was able to use existing mains which was installed within the roof space.
We opted for Chauvet EVE range of fixtures for their professional appearance and reliability, without having to venture into the Chauvet ‘Pro range’. The main fixtures were a combination of P150 Wash lighting fixtures F50z LED Fresnel fixtures, and E100 profile spots with barn doors. These kept in with the traditional ‘theatre look’. These were mounted on the existing truss, and we added some vertical pipes to each side wall with 2 fixtures on each. We also installed a quantity of SlimPar wash lighting fixtures as on stage down lighters. These were all fed into 2 Chauvet Data Stream DMX splitters, which were installed at the side of the stage.
The school wanted to encourage students to engage in the operational aspect of the performances. The choice of desk was important, so the students could interact by both hands-on control, along with digital interface, to gain both the intuitive physical fixture control and to build lighting scenes etc, merged with the modern technology of App control. For this, we used the industry recognised brand, ChamSys, which is the sister company of Chauvet. This enabled programming to be extremely simple due to the Chauvet fixtures already being part of the ChamSys software. Our desk of choice was the ChamSys Quick Q20. We also supplied a ChamSys custom flight case, for extra protection.
A Word from the Client
”Obviously we wanted to keep this with a local company, but we still had to obtain the obligatory 3 quotes required by the board. The first time that Mick visited, early one evening, he’s already done his research and brought along a team of specialists from the lighting manufacturer. This gave us comfort, knowing that support was local also, with Chauvet being Nottinghamshire based. Their presentation and importantly pricing was where it needed to be. They came in through the half term period to install, then came back in term time to do the training. It looks great and has since encouraged new students to get more involved.
Chris Ryder Head of Music