At a time when then market leader Strand’s spotlights came in fixed beam angles, the Silhouette range, from newcomer CCT Lighting, offered a revolution: the zoom lens, able to change the size of the beam (or the gobo it was projecting) quickly and easily. For TV studios or theatres with a permanent or semi-permanent rig, where the job a light was doing might change from one show to the next, this was a revelation!

CCT started as a small hire outfit, serving amateur dramatics and then later TV production. The Silhouette – in its original blue version, shown here – was originally created for television. The revised, production version offered a system rather than just a single fixture, allowing you to mix different lamphouses (1k, 1k axial, 2k eventually even 2.5k) with lens tubes offering different zoom ranges.

It became a mainstay of British theatre for decades, the Sil 30 the most common workhorse, sometimes paired with CCT’s colour wheel or Coloursette semaphore colour changer. A custom version for the new National Theatre offered a cunning removable shutter module, to allow quick re-focusing of even tricksy shapes between shows.

Some are still in use to this day – a true, working classic!

Silhouette Prototype
From Jim Laws Collection
Click thumbnail to enlarge

Silhouette Prototype
From Jim Laws Collection
Click thumbnail to enlarge