Karillon2

Orion Lighting

Orion were responsible for manufacturing some pretty fantastic projection effects wheels, some are still in use today. Orion was created by Larry Wooden from a basic need to give his Band some lighting with a different vista than the obiquious liquid wheel. Larry used his photo experience in making a new flavour of wheel, the graphic wheel was born. The first ones were simple dots and stripes, and later the idea of using a mask and real slides, of Crystal Palace dinosaurs actually gave Larry a winner, and it led the way to the concept of a continuous panoramic design. All others by other lighting designers seem to follow from the original concept by Larry. Look at the wheels and thank Larry for giving us some really great effects.

Shop Front, see wheels on display

Larry Wooden

The wheels on this page were manufactured by Orion Lighting.
All designs copyright of Larry Wooden 1967-2009.

Orion did not produce any 3" effects cassette. Some of the designs never made it into production, but those shown here all did. Larry did have his own website, but sadly this is no longer, so my thanks to Larry for his kind permission to reproduce the information presented on this page.

The Dr Who Lightshow commenced in 1968 when some lighting was made up to accompany the band D’Arcy Spice. After a short while requests came from the new DJs asking to either supply them with lights or do a lightshow for them. In practice both supply of lighting and lightshows was done. The lightshow ended when the Orion shop was opened, the equipment was then used for demonstrations. Shown left is one of the setups with the Tutor II projector among others.


Shown above is the catalog from 1972 listing items available at that time.
		Shown left an image scan (well digital photo actually) of an Orion wheel, click the image to see the wheel image in clear high resolution. This is an indication of the quality of these wheels, the wheel was used extensively and bought in the 70's.

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A note about copyright......I have tried to find publishers or anyone i can get, but some of this content is very old now. If you see your work here and it's an issue, contact me. I will either change, acknowledge or remove it. (site policy here)