Lighting designer Eric Price turned to Elation’s Proteus Lucius™ as the feature light of an all-purpose floor package for rock band Taking Back Sunday as they headlined the travelling Sad Summer Festival in the U.S. in July. Reminiscent of the legendary Warped Tour, the fourth incarnation of Sad Summer Festival ran coast to coast and featured a strong lineup of pop punk’s finest bands. 

Price has been with Taking Back Sunday since 2017 and served as lighting designer, programmer and operator for the band’s Sad Summer set. He says he had used the Proteus Lucius before, on a tour with Mastodon, and knew the all-purpose LED moving head well. “The Proteus Lucius is great technology with a lot of features and you don’t lose anything with it being IP rated,” he said. “It makes no feature compromises and is just what you would expect from a professional moving fixture.”

‘do-all fixture’

Proteus Lucius, the compact brother to Elation’s popular Proteus Maximus, is an all-purpose fixture in the market-leading Proteus line of weatherproof luminaires. Abundantly bright at 33,500 lumens and loaded with features, it houses a CMY color mixing system with variable CTO and 5-slot color wheel and can be used as a profile, beam or wash light, reducing the need for variant fixtures.

“It’s a solid fixture in every category but here’s the silver lining – there are ZERO downsides to the fact that it is weatherproof,” stated Jason Reberski, CEO at Chicago-based JRLX, Inc (jrlxinc.com), lighting vendor for Taking Back Sunday’s Lucius floor package. “The Proteus Lucius is lightweight, compact, and super quiet. It is perfectly useable in an opera house, an arena, an outdoor festival, or a movie shoot. The IP65 rating is simply a bonus that makes it even more versatile. It really is a ‘do-all’ fixture!” Taking Back Sunday’s flown package for the Sad Summer shows was supplied by LIT Lighting out of Tempe, Arizona.

Multiple risers / set carts

Price says that for the Sad Summer tour the band wanted a more theatrical design feel, something that would allow them to move to different positions during the show. The result was a cleaner, more streamlined stage that featured a series of risers that the band could move between on stage. Besides the drum riser, a 20 ft wide x 4 ft tall upstage graded riser acted as both a performance platform and runway leading down to a 4 x 4 midstage vocal riser with dual staircase.  

The Proteus Lucius rode on four quick-to-deploy, custom set carts that butted up to the runway riser, a seamless height connection that Price says made it look as if the fixtures were on the riser but were actually just upstage of it. “There was enough depth to the stage that I could just clear the risers but could come down through the band without going right into the front row,” the designer said. “I could do low intensity beam looks into the audience from there or point them up over the crowd and into the sky.” The Lucius fixtures also flanked an illuminated set piece, a custom LED neon sign of the band’s logo that would emerge between the set carts.

Multi-functional

Price says the Lucius were a good fit for the show and he used them consistently throughout the set for “a bit of everything.” Being an outdoor show with haze difficulties due to the elements, he often had the fixtures narrowed down for ambient-busting, eye-catching beam looks. “It’s sometimes hard to pull off a show in the elements with the wind and ambient light but the Lucius held up just great and really punched through.”

Reberski says that the best part of Lucius is that “it is not a niche filler” and Price took advantage of that multi-functionality, often accessing the Lucius’s three gobo wheels, sometimes to complement special effects like low fog. “There were some looks I was really happy with as the low fog came through the risers on to the band,” he explained. “Here I pointed the Lucius down into the fog for some fun beam effects, breakups, flower patterns and other great looks. I love the classic cone gobo and had fun making some split color wheel cone looks or two-tone laser-etched beam looks. Other times I zoomed the fixtures out for wide washes or prism looks, and I even used them glowing at low intensity for eye candy.” 

Another aspect of the Lucius the designer found impressive was the fixture’s speed. “Being a rated weatherproof light, I was impressed with how quick they are, the pan/tilt, the optics and things like that. They were very responsive and really friendly to work with programming wise.” 

Handled the heat

Of course, doing outdoor shows in grilling heat and never really knowing what the weather will be like, the Proteus’s proven IP65 rating was also a key factor in its choice. “They sat out all day in the summer heat—up to 108 degrees for the Texas shows—with no issues to report. I, however, tried to spend as much time as possible in the air-conditioned bus,” Price concludes.

Lighting Crew:  

Crew Chief:  Cody Lisle

L1:  AI Hatten

L1:  “Beanie”

Stage Manager: “Worm”