Twelve Clay Paky Mythos fixtures projected text and images onto the Tower of
London in September as part of a star-studded charity event honouring wounded
armed forces veterans.

The initiative was launched to raise awareness of the Haig Housing Trust, which
offers housing assistance to ex-service people and the week culminated in a
fundraising event, “For Queen and Country’, to mark the charity’s centenary.

London-based Lightning Events was tasked with projecting the messages onto the
side of the tower, and specified the Mythos fixtures, rigging them in weatherproof
Flight Domes around 30 metres from the tower walls and near to the moat.

Production manager for the event, Lightning Events’ Tom Foster, explains: “We
liaised directly with the Haig Housing Trust for this project. Their initial brief asked
to project along all sides of Tower, which would have been extremely expensive.
We therefore devised a more economically viable alternative, which relied on the
power of the Clay Paky Mythos fixtures. We had looked at other fixtures but the
Mythos offers exceptional zoom. Some of the gobos we had were particularly text
heavy, but using Mythos we could project long distances – sometimes 50 metres –
with good clarity and clean sharp text.’

Controlled by a Chamsys MQ60, Foster rigged most of the 12 Mythos fixtures
pointing at the north and west walls.

Lightning Events offers a full production service providing event lighting, event
audio, AV, staging, set design, event furniture and power generation and
distribution facilities.

Mythos is a highly advanced form of hybrid light: a 470 watt-lamp spotlight, which
produces an outstanding large light beam, featuring a zoom that ranges from 4° to
50° (1:12 ratio); and also an extraordinary beam light, allowing the designer to
switch to a minimum fixed beam angle of just 2.5°. A large, very dense, 160 mm-
diameter light beam leaves the Mythos’s front lens and remains parallel for its
entire length even at great distances.

Mythos won many Innovation Awards of the Industry and has been used on an
incredible amount of events, including the Sky Sports F1 Show, a commemoration
of 25 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Six Nations.

Alongside the Mythos projections, portraits of wounded and sick servicemen, taken
by celebrity photographer Rankin, were projected onto the walls of the Tower using
21k Panasonic WUXGA Projectors. This part of the visuals was managed by First
Network.

MC of events for the Tower of London event was Carol Vorderman. In her capacity
as first female Ambassador for the RAF Air Cadets, she said: “I’m delighted to have
been invited to switch on this incredible illumination of the Tower of London for such
a great cause. Haig Housing, through its fundraising campaign Coming Home, does
inspiring and vital work getting our wounded heroes into a specially adapted home
where they can begin to live independent and fulfilling lives again. These men and
women have given so much to us as a nation, and it is an honour to help them in
return.’