New Event, and Fixtures, Make Their Debut
As luck would have it, PLSN editor Nook Schoenfeld was able to take some time away from the preparation of this particularly large issue to travel to Del Mar, CA, just outside San Diego, to light a special VIP stage performance for multi-Grammy award winning singer/songwriter/guitarist Sheryl Crow.Along with the allure of Southern California and the chance to work with the multi-talented Ms. Crow, the gig helped usher in the premiere of a much-noted music event — the inaugural KAABOO Festival — and gave Nook the first crack at using two brand-new fixtures from Elation: the much-anticipated Platinum FLX hybrid moving head and new ACL 360 Matrix narrow-beam LED effect light.
Visions Lighting (visionslighting.com) provided the gear for LD Chris Lisle’s show design for the stages. Nook used the setup for Sheryl Crow’s show just prior to the three-day event.
“I really liked the Platinum FLX,” said Nook, who also credited the ACL 360 Matrix fixtures for their “punch” and the ease of creating “fanned arrays of beams.”
“Being the first time anyone had used these fixtures, I had to get a rushed fixture library to use in my console,” Nook noted. “So I was actually unsure of what I would see on stage for that evening’s performance, as I wrote the entire light show in the light of the California sun.
“But here’s where the beauty of this beam came through,” Nook added. “Despite the sun blazing away I could see where the beams were focusing on the Marley floor with ease. Come show time, the focuses were almost perfect. Another great attribute of this was the ability to pick out gobos and sharpen them up with the focus encoder — during daylight! How rad is that?”
About the Festival
The KAABOO Festival took place at the Del Mar Racetrack and Fairgrounds just north of San Diego from Sept. 18-20. Promoted as a new kind of arts and entertainment experience — “everything a typical music festival is not” — it featured dancing, contemporary art and fine cuisine from celebrity chefs, a dedicated comedy stage and, of course, live music, with top acts including No Doubt, The Killers and the Zac Brown Band.
Gallagher Staging played a big role in the construction at the site, with 29 semi-trucks worth of gear. They also constructed the pool site VIP area and provided most of the truss and scaffold towers on site. They supplied over 100 of their patented G-Blocks as well. Most of the printed soft goods on site were made at their warehouse.
Kleege Industries out of San Diego was responsible for the construction of a few of the main stages as well.
Overseeing the lighting designs for the festival site as a whole was LD Chris Lisle. This also included ambient lighting from the roof of the grounds to the palm trees surrounding the track.
The Trestles Stage
Nook lit Sheryl Crow’s pre-festival event on the Trestles stage, named for surfing spots at San Onofre State Beach near San Diego. This VIP show, staged on the evening of Sept. 17, was attended by well over a thousand invited guests.
Visions Lighting provided 24 Platinum FLX fixtures, 24 ACL 360 Matrix fixtures and 10 Platinum Wash ZFX Pro fixtures.
Erik Parker, associate lighting designer for the festival as a whole, served as LD for the Trestles Stage, and was looking for “a good mixture of wash fixtures and spot fixtures.” That’s when John Dunn Elation’s rental and production market manager, mentioned the new Platinum FLX and ACL 360 Matrix. “These both seemed like perfect options to fill out the rig; then I used the Platinum Wash ZFX Pros for a clean downstage wash,” Erik noted.
The Platinum FLX and ACL 360 fixtures were positioned upstage, as well as on trusses flown on either side of the stage for a side wash. The FLX uses Philips’ 470W Platinum 20R lamp and emits up to 20,000 lumens. The ACL 360 Matrix fixtures, which feature 360° pan and tilt rotation and dense 4° beam from each lens, were hung from two upstage trusses.
Nook admitted that while he’s all for fixture versatility, he’s not a fan of every new “hybrid” fixture now on the market. “I can’t stand the shift in brightness and the timing of the lens when they pop out the narrow lens and assume a medium flood beam,” he said. “The lumens seem to diminish instantly, and the beam just disappears from 40 feet away.” But, he added, “I didn’t really have much problem with that today.”
As for the ACL 360 Matrix fixtures, “the punch emitted out of these babies was quite nice, and focusing fanned arrays of beams was simple,” Nook said. “I had enough of them to make a nice wash on the stage despite the small aperture of the beam.”
For front lighting, Chris Lisle’s team chose Platinum Wash ZFX Pro fixtures, which are multi-purpose RGBW wash lights with 19 15W LEDs and array controllable zones for eye-candy looks. “This fixture threw out some serious lumens as I was able to cover each band member with a single fixture in a dark lavender color,” Nook commented. “Yes, they have a sexy Mauve color for an LED fixture!”
Visions also supplied gear for some of the other stages at the event, most named after prominent surfing spots. (There were five outdoor stages and two indoor stages in all.) Along with Trestles, Vision gear could be seen lighting comedians at the Humor Me stage, the Encore stage and Zuma stage.
“Visions was really on top of their game,” Nook said. “I caught the No Doubt show on the other side of the concourse after we played. Their stage was rocking. There were easily a couple hundred moving lights all working perfectly. I wish I knew who was running the lights because they were just crushing it….
“HUGE Kudos to LD Chris Lisle for designing some great looking rigs at all the stages,” Nook added. “All of us LDs had plenty of toys in our tool box and grandMA2 consoles to pound away on. KAABOO did the lighting right.”
