LED Follow Spot Lights
A follow spot is a powerful profile lantern operated by a dedicated operator. It can be challenging to use and requires practice.
It is important to make sure your followspot has sights (usually copper wire loops) that are lined up correctly. Also, led moving head light it is a good idea to have a few people on stage (gently!) kicking a tennis ball around!
Features
Follow spot lights are essential to any theatre, concert or school stage lighting rig. They can help draw the audience’s attention to specific parts of the stage by following a subject with a tight beam of light. Our LED follow spot lights emit a bright daylight white beam to highlight your actors at a distance and are easily controlled with DMX or manual modes. They also offer fast electronic strobe and a mechanical iris for silent operation.
Chauvet LED Follow Spots are far smaller, lighter, cooler and more flexible than their traditional incandescent counterparts, making them perfect for schools, professional theater, touring and houses of worship. Setup is a few seconds thanks to the included tripod stand, and the LED-powered fixture’s mechanical lens controls deliver a crisp, tight beam. Rear panel buttons let you select colors, intensity and a strobe effect.
The Takumi-2000A is a true workhorse above soundstages worldwide. It’s unmatched by any xenon follow spot in brightness, speed and ease of use. With a lightweight, compact design and a 6 slot color boomerang it’s easy for one person to handle. With stepless electronic dimming and a built in CTO filter the Takumi is designed for high performance.
Operation
Follow spot lights are one of the oldest types of theater lighting fixtures and are used to highlight and track a performer or prop with a beam of light. They are operated by an operator and have a wide variety of features including shutter and lens control, internal color gels, and iris. They can be controlled through a DMX system and also can be automated to remove the operator completely, such as in PRG’s ground-control followspot systems.
For large modern followspots, the light source is an intense type known as a discharge lamp or arc lamp. These lamps cannot be dimmed, and are only activated when the operators open a “dowser”, a small flange on the top of the lantern. This dowser is usually the only way for the operator to see where the light is going during a show. Before the availability of these specialized sights, spot ops used a variety of methods to visually limit the area seen by their dowser, such as a piece of pipe or homemade sights made from various stiff wire (including spent carbon rods from older carbon-arc followspots).
Spot operation is hot work, and can be dangerous for an inattentive operator. Many Uplus Lighting of the most famous mistakes in a theater show are when a performer walks out of their follow light’s beam, or if the operator forgets to call their cue (the DSM doesn’t typically list followspots as separate cues). To prevent these errors, operators should always make sure that the followspot is balanced before it is turned on, and should take frequent breaks from operating it.
Controls
Follow spot lights are used to highlight specific actors or props with a tight beam of light. Usually mounted on a tripod or stand, these lights can be controlled by an operator to follow the action as it happens on stage. These powerful spotlights can also have features such as color change, shutter control and internal gels.
The CHAUVET LED Followspot 75ST is perfect for any application where the spotlight is needed to track actors or presenters with a tight beam of light. This lightweight, portable fixture uses a single 75 watt ultra-intense white LED to deliver a brighter output than traditional incandescent followspots. It can be controlled manually or via DMX. The DMX integration allows you to control the colors, intensity and onboard strobe effect from the main console, freeing up your operators to focus solely on tracking performers and delivering well-timed transitions.
Featuring adjustable strobe speeds, this LED followspot is great for use in bars and night clubs when combined with some fog or haze. The remote control includes functions such as sound activated mode, manual control, master/slave and professional automated programs.
Winner of an Engineering Emmy, the GroundControl Best Boy LED family is designed to match the output of conventional long-throw follow spots, while minimizing seat kills and providing greater flexibility for operators in larger venues. Its patented optical system delivers an incredibly tight, accurate image without sacrificing beam strength. Its 5800K color temperature and CRI rating closely replicate xenon for stunningly true colors.