The popular game show, for its 37th season, replaced its lamp fixtures with compact LED profiles LED Ayrton Khamsin generating less heat, requiring less power, and needing not much maintenance, provided by Sony Set Lighting.
“LEDs are now able to replace a 1200W arc source,” declares William McLachlan, Lighting Director and Programmer. “I already used Ayrton fixtures on other shows; they’re building interesting lights that are becoming mainline workhorse fixtures.”
Thanks to McLachlan’s long-standing relationship with ACT Lighting, the Ayrton exclusive distributor in North America, he learned about Khamsin fixtures. “We wanted to expand the show’s plot with moving lights, and Khamsin had just come out. They had all the settings, the output and the quality of light that we needed, so ACT provided us some Khamsins for a shoot-out, and we actually shot some shows with them.”
The Khamsin units “definitely stood out,” he reports, so McLachlan recommended them to Jeff Engel, DP and Lighting Designer, and the Khamsins soon joined a group of 85 moving lights over the stage.
“That’s a big footprint to cover, (150 x 250-foot); we needed lights that would be usable from 90 feet away, and Khamsin’s output put them over the top,” says McLachlan.
“They serve as moving key lights that save us lots of time as shots are set up, they fill the need for shutters that are required for a portion of the plot, and they paint the scenery with texture, pattern, softness, tone and colour.” The program’s puzzle board and wheel remain the same show to show but the rest of the set changes to offer viewers an array of different looks.
“The Khamsin units went live with the new season of Wheel of Fortune that began shooting in July. “We’ve done our first two taping cycles, and the Khamsins are working great and looking fantastic,” McLachlan reports. Brian McElroy is the gaffer for Wheel of Fortune.
More information can be found at Ayrton website
