Alford Media recently invested in a large complement of Ayrton Rivale fixtures—distributed exclusively in North America by ACT Entertainment—for use on its busy roster of projects. One of the biggest projects for the Rivale so far has been The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2024, a gathering of women and non-binary technologists, held at the Philadelphia Convention Center the past October. Now in its second year working on the conference, Alford served as the AV specialist for the general sessions featuring keynote speakers, presenters, and panels. The event drew about 12,000 attendees.
Alford’s senior lighting designer Kurt Wunsch’s rig consisted of 747 fixtures, and he said the lighting design “did not have a lot of flash and movement. Rather it had creative looks and changing color palettes that set the scene for an environment that was comfortable, happy and beautiful.”
The Rivale were mounted on truss spanning the 500-foot stage where they lit drapes flanking the LED videowall backdrop with custom gobo patterns. “I didn’t use all the cool bells and whistles of the Rivale, but needed their output to deliver the punch, color and crispness to fill out the rest of the space,” Wunsch explained. “They were the strongest choice for this task.”
The LED videowall’s graphics and a free-form, curved and self-illuminated step unit all featured topographical map-style visuals, which were reinforced by the custom gobos with artwork that was supplied by the client’s creative team.
“As a design tool, the Rivale were exactly what I needed,” said Wunsch. “For this event, the fixtures’ zoom ratio was especially important since we were throwing from different distances.”
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Wunsch had used Ayrton rental fixtures prior to the Rivale purchase, so he knew “the quality of the products” and was “very excited about adding them to our inventory.” He quickly went from “trying out the new arrivals to requesting them on half-a-dozen events already,” including one with a lot of dance numbers needing color and movement from the Rivale.
“ACT was thrilled to show and deliver these Rivale; Alford is extremely careful with their gear decisions, and we knew Rivale would be the best possible fit for the broad array of work they do,” concluded Ryan Hindinger, ACT Entertainment’s market manager-lighting.
