Lighting designer David Hersey had long been fascinated with curtains of light, inspired originally by the work of Josef Svoboda. He started experimenting with strips of Par56 VNSP lamps, built in to scenery, later mounted to frames of steel or aluminium, and eventually made to move by attaching flying lines or radio antenna motors. By the time of Miss Saigon in 1989 a giant Rainbow colour scroller had been bolted to the front!

For Saigon’s 1991 Broadway production, the New York production electrician suggested building a better, fully integrated version. In just six months Philip Nye and the team at DHA Lighting built not just the Digital Light Curtain but, in the time before moving light desks, a custom control system, LightMoves, running on an Apple Mac and communicating to the lights using a custom, bi-directional control protocol, LightTalk.

Other designers pushed the unit in new ways. Andrew Bridge needed a shorter version to fit into scenery for Sunset Boulevard. Richard Pilbrow wanted angled shafts of light for Showboat. This unit is a combination of those two: a Pitching Six-Lamp Digital Light Curtain, last used in David’s design for Les Mis at the Queen’s Theatre.

DHA Pitching Digital Light Curtain
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DHA Pitching Digital Light Curtain
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Video
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