06.06.2014 | All Elation LED Rig No Joke on Comedian Gabriel Iglesias “Unity Through Laughter” Tour

Professional comedian’s often use an ellipsoidal, a few house lights and not much else for their performances. Not so with Gabriel Iglesias whose current “Unity Through Laughter” tour has him travelling across the U.S. with an Elation lighting rig of spots, washes, strips, strobes, PARs and more, including the new Elation Satura Spot LED Pro moving head.

Supplied by Sacramento Production & Lighting (www.sacproduction.com), the Elation lighting package was chosen for several reasons including durability and price point, a major consideration these days for the touring market, according to Dion Cook, Sacramento Production & Lighting’s CEO.

Dion explains the concept behind the show. “The concept for the past five years has been to give the audience more than just a run-of-the-mill comedy show with a guy in front of a curtain,” he says. “And by that I mean it needed to be an experience. Gabriel’s show has a mini rock show feel where we incorporate live Twitter feeds, videos, and lighting to bring the audience into our world for a couple of hours.”

Dion, who together with production and touring manager Ryan Cornelius designed the set and lighting package for the tour, admits that the Satura Spot was not his first choice as he had not seen any LED spot fixture on the market that had the punch they required, and without a proven track record they knew there could be some bugs to work out.

Power-friendly Satura’s

“We were looking for a more ‘green,’ power-friendly solution to go along with the rest of the rig so we did a comparison with other discharge lamp spots and LED spots,” he explains. “In the end, the Satura’s were the best choice and we can now say it was the correct one. We are averaging 2- 3 one offs each week and the fixtures are performing great!  The additional benefit of the low power consumption and built-in wireless allows us the freedom to move the in-house fixtures to locations that would have been much more difficult with traditional spot movers.”

Featuring a full spectrum of color and graphics possibilities, the Satura Spot LED is as bright as a 575W discharge fixture yet consumes half as much energy and its 300W LED engine lasts 80 times longer. On the Gabriel Iglesias tour they are outfitted with 48 custom hi-res glass gobos to rear project "graffiti” onto brick scrims below two large video screens. Additional fixtures are placed on the downstage edge left and right to project logo's, posters and social media tags onto the ceiling and venue walls. More Satura fixtures are hung midstage for a painted floor look.  

All LED

The Satura Spots are just the start of an Elation rig that is all LED. Also included are Platinum Wash ZFX Pro RGBW moving heads, Design LED Strip RGBAWs, Protron LED Strobes, ELAR 72UV PARs and SPL LED Flat pars along with custom built LED “barn lights.” The Platinum Wash ZFX's are used for area lighting while the Design LED Strips and ELAR 72UV PARs are used for soft goods lighting. The Protron LED Strobes are used to give the comedian a grand entrance. The show was pre-visualized using Elation’s Capture Polar lighting design software. Out on tour with the show as road LD and lighting operator is Hunter Pipes who controls the rig from a HedgeHog 4 console, the newest and smallest controller in the High End Systems Hog family, and a console that is distributed by Elation Professional.

Real-world demo

The Gabriel Iglesias tour, which acts as a real-world demo for the Satura Spot and allows Elation to bring in clients to the show and show off the product, continues through the summer and beyond. “We are happy to say that we are the first tour to have the Satura fixtures on the road and welcome anyone to stop by and take a look,” Dion states. “John Lopez and Raul Fonseca at Elation have been instrumental in making this real world demo of the Satura’s happen and we cannot thank them and everyone at Elation enough for their help and support.”