Vari-Lite’s SL BAR 660 were chosen for its high brightness, advanced color mixing and 60˚ beam angle

When one of Canada’s leading motorcycle museums needed to upgrade the lighting for its street-level window displays, they turned to entertainment technology specialist ShowTech AVL. “Museum director Brent Cooke asked us to redesign the lighting and ‘give it some punch’!” said Brian Konechny, President of ShowTech AVL.

Konechny, a veteran of Canada’s event production industry and a long-term customer of Vari-Lite, knew where to look for new, state-of-the-art LED lighting fixtures that would deliver the required ‘punch’ and help to draw visitors to Deeley Motorcycle Exhibition’s 100 Years of Motorcycling exhibit. He looked to Vari-Lite’s SL BAR 660, a linear stage wash light fixture, for its high brightness, advanced color mixing and 60˚ beam angle.

The SL BAR 660s surprised us - we got some great deep, rich colors. That deep color wash and the beam spread mean they were perfect for the job - Brian Konechny, President of ShowTech AVL

“We hadn’t used them before on an installation of this type,” says Konechny. “They work very well as a theatrical cyc fixture, so of course we have sold them into theatres, but we’d never really considered using them as a display light. But as we looked at their features, and of course cost, it made total sense. I knew the output of the SL BAR 660s would be a substantial upgrade, and making sure the light filled each of the nine window display areas was pretty easy with the SL BAR 660’s beam spread.”

When it came to filling the displays with eye-catching color, the SL BAR 660s were certainly up to the task. “With the Vari-Lite fixtures we get not only the pastels we need, but also the saturated colors that you don’t get from many RGBW fixtures,” says Konechny. “The SL BAR 660s surprised us - we got some great deep, rich colors. That deep color wash and the beam spread mean they were perfect for the job. Brent loved it. He really wanted the windows to ‘pop’ from the street level, and they do!”He concludes, “Apart from the cool lighting programming by Light Works Creative’s Heinie Enslin, and how great the lighting looks from the street view, you still have to park your car and head into the museum! The history of all brands of motorcycles is fantastic. You don’t have to be a biker to appreciate the evolution of great mechanical inventions. We just made their display ‘pop’ a little bit - well OK, a lot!”