Chroma-Q Color Force 72s Perform Brightly for The Tragically Hip Tour

	The Tragically Hip Tour. Photo: Shawn Lawless

Chroma-Q Color Force 72 super-bright LED battens are being rigged in an inspired fashion to spell out the word "HIP" for Canadian rock band, The Tragically Hip's current 2015 tour.

The group, which have had nine number one albums in Canada, recently embarked on the Fully Completely Tour -- playing their album of the same name in its entirety to their legion of fans.

Brent Clark is production designer for the North American tour, which kicked off in Toronto in January and to date has visited other major cities including New York, Chicago, Boston, Washington DC, and Montreal.

"The concept behind the staging and lighting was to make it look a bit 'throwback'," says Clark. "The grid with the Color Force 72s on is meant to look like an old fashioned digital clock. Spelling out the word 'HIP' was my idea, as the band are affectionately known as 'The Hip' -- and using the punch of the Color Force 72s we've achieved a striking look. I run them in their bigger channel mode, so I can run all kinds of chases and do some really interesting effects. They can also supply a huge wash of color over the band, so they're great for that purpose in addition to bright white effects."

Featuring a radically increased RGBA color-mixing palette, the Color Force range provides outstanding color blend across the spectrum and a high CRI of 92 -- for equally impressive bold saturates, subtle pastels, and a complete range of whites from 1,000K to 10,000K.

The super bright fixture can light a 26' drop cyclorama, making it ideal as a single fixture solution for concert touring, corporate events, exhibitions, television, and theatre.

In addition, the range offers theatrical grade dimming, emulating the extremely smooth dimming curve of tungsten fixtures, from completely off to completely on, and with no visible stepping or jerkiness.

"The light output of the Color Force 72s is fantastic and I can really get some nice saturated looks out of them," Clark continues. "The colors are a lot of primary looks as well as some very unique shades of green and yellow, to create a real sort of dark sick vibe."

Clark worked closely with Ian Gordon of North American rental company, Christie Lites, to supply the Color Force 72s. The show director for the tour is Tyler Pigeon.

Chroma-Q is distributed in North America by A.C. Lighting.