Annual Event Expands from its Red Rock Roots with Move to Mile High Stadium, Assist from Brown Note and ESP
The Global Dance Festival is the largest annual summer music festival in the Rocky Mountain region of the U.S. It has been a cornerstone of dance music in Colorado since the early 2000s, staged for many years at one of the best venues in the world, Red Rocks Amphitheatre. In 2017, the Global Dance Festival took its leave of Red Rocks and debuted in its new home at Mile High Stadium in Denver, providing attendees with an expanded experience that included multiple stage, arts, and carnival playground over a two-day span.
For the last two years Brown Note Productions, under the guidance of owners Sara and Ryan Knutson, have provided audio, lighting, video and lasers along with full production crews for the renowned festival. This year they were contracted for both the Global Summit Stage and the Northern Lights Tent.
Saxton Waller, who now works with Brown Note as their lead in house designer after 20 years of touring, headed up the design team on the main stage. He and Ryan Knutson worked together for ten of those years as LD and FOH engineer respectively.
“Working on design concepts for production companies is decidedly different from designing for a touring band,” Saxton says, though obviously his experience as a touring designer lends itself very well into “our projects here at Brown Note.”
His knowledge, acquired as a touring LD walking into festival situations, informs his designs. “What I have learned as a designer is, simplicity leads to success in the festival environment, because it’s tricky for a touring LD in that environment. I have learned over the past couple of years to make that process as cool as it can look while setting them up for success at the same time.”
Generally, festivals allow for little or no programming time, even in the best of circumstances. Saxton adds, “Having a grid-like structure that allows incoming LD’s to quickly grab their pan and tilt to work on their positions saves time.”
Stage, Lighting, Video
Stageline’s Mobile 575 stage shaped the lighting design, which needed to conform to the stage’s hang points and requirement for an evenly distributed weight load. To meet those requirements while also ensuring strategic focus positions, Saxton opted for a big grid look in his design.
“This year, there was no headliner rider that dictated any fixture choice,” Waller notes. “I knew the video wall size, and that was about it. Deadmau5, in particular, as well as several of the headliners, asked that the video wall be short and wide.”
The lighting rig hangs as an arced wave that frames the video wall, which measures 40 by 14 feet (WxH) and was built from 7.5mm MC-7H panels from ROE Creative Display. Densely populated with fixtures, the three offstage towers at stage left and stage right complemented the roof grid shaped by four straight trusses. The setup also included 24 Chauvet Nexus 4×4 Matrix LED blinders, which provided additional pixel mapping possibilities.
A big Martin Mac 101 presence is noticeable in the rig. One of Waller’s signature looks is the “straddling” of fixtures. In this case, 64 MAC 101’s straddle either side of 32 GLP JDC1 strobe/wash fixtures.
“The idea there was to really accentuate color through the rig,” Waller says. “You can have a gorgeous wash on your artist, or a big open up look with the 101’s, then be able to run any kind of effect through the JDC1’s and 101’s together. It creates a really big, hot LED source with tilt control for big kicks and fun things like that.”
“The JDC1 is a newer fixture in our inventory,” notes Waller. “Everyone from rock ‘n’ roll to DJ’s loves it. Control-wise, it is has the ability to break into a bunch of individual cells or get that DJ rock ‘n’ roll source crowd-blinding look and old-school, straight-down crazy strobe look.”
The rig also has a lot of the MAC Axiom hybrid moving lights. These are symmetrically hung at different levels on the towers and in the air. Coupled with Elation Sixpar 100IP’s in the center of the overhead rig, “LDs can create a grid that can come straight down from the top or straight across from the sides to grid out the video wall,” says Waller.
The DJ performs on a two-foot-tall riser behind a 35-by-four-foot wall made from 7.5mm ROE MC-7H screen panels. A grandMA2 controlled the visuals, with a Pangolin system handling the Light Vector LD 25 lasers Brown Note provided.
Extending the Visual Impact
Julian Bradley is the president and co-owner of Denver-based Electronic Sales and Production (ESP). He came over from the U.K. when he was 18, traveled all over the U.S. and found the Rocky Mountain region to suit him best, settling in Colorado.
Together with business partner Jason Goetz, Bradley founded ESP in 1998. “We did not have a large amount of money or investors, so we started small,” Bradley says. “We realized very early if we were going to last, we had to find our niche, which came about with LED technology.”
ESP and Brown Note have collaborated on several projects over the years, most notably, the Decadence New Year’s extravaganza in Denver. For this year’s Global Dance Festival, ESP created custom LED diffusion tubes as effects walls on the P.A. wings and delay video towers.
“We’re a small fabrication design company, specializing in creative LED-source lighting,” says Bradley. “We have our own little niche, filling in certain spots at festivals where you can add a custom element. LED sources are the main part of our specialty as a design company, but we do not involve ourselves with panels or tiles; it is more about pixels.
“At ESP, we have really mastered an understanding of how Art-Net networks with LED through our knowledge of working with the Madrix control system since its inception in 2000,” Bradley adds, crediting Christian Hertel and Sebastian Wissmen from Madrix for their help. “Although we are working on the same page as the lighting and video designers, we have our own element.”
After all the dust has settled from the design of the stage, and all the artists had been satisfied with what Brown Note provides, ESP looks at the design to see how they can improve aesthetics or find ways to make it look bigger within budget constraints. “That is where we step up and specialize in creating and detailing custom work for different areas of the stage and festival,” says Bradley.
Bradley notes that the LED diffusion tube effects walls, which incorporate five-foot diffused custom LED tubes for the offstage wing areas and for the main and video delay towers in the crowd, proved to be quite a large project, as 234 tubes had to be made that attached to individual truss frame structures measuring 25 by 10 feet.
Once complete, the delay video towers with the diffused LED tube structures enhanced a combined effect with the video from the main stage. These towers were in pairs set back 50 and 100 feet and supported video screens made up of 200 of ROE’s 7.5mm MC-7H LED tiles.
To keep the design from looking redundant or static, ESP sent the Madrix patch ahead of time to artists so they could program their own effects. “We also have a Blackmagic Design card,” adds Bradley. “We can then take an HDMI signal live from the artist VJ and reproduce the same colors in a low-res effect to [add to] what’s playing on the main screen.”
Bradley operated the Global Dance Festival fixtures for any acts that needed one. As the lead technical director for the festival, Goetz was responsible for setting up over 220 universes of pixel control over a custom Art-Net network for the show
“Through friends in the industry, I was aware of the level Saxton was working on and the shows he was working on, but we did not meet until he joined Brown Note in their new digs just up the road from me,” Bradley says. “We had a mutual respect for each other’s work before that, and it has gone on to some great collaboration, such as this, since.”
Global Dance Festival 2018
Crew
From Brown Note:
Sara and Ryan Knutson (owners), Saxton Waller (lead designer), Joe Casper, Brian Weyrich, Kristi Smith, Amanda Ritchie, Francis Brisco, Matthew Ardoin, John Ward, Tyler Benson, Wes Wilson, Kelsie O’Mara, Dave Hall, Joshua Welch
From Electronic Sales & Production (ESP):
Julian Bradley (president/co-owner), Jason Goetz (co-owner), Brandon Cordova (crew chief), Lonnie, Terry, “Red”, Pa
Gear
Global Summit Stage
Lighting:
2 grandMA2 consoles
18 Martin MAC Viper Profiles
64 Martin MAC 101’s
26 Martin MAC Axiom Hybrids
32 GLP JDC1 Strobe
18 Elation CUEpix panel fixtures
24 Chauvet Nexus 4×4 LED matrix blinder
72 Elation Sixpar 100IP (supplied by ESP)
Video:
1 Main Wall (40’ x 14’); 140 ROE MC-7H 7.5mm tiles
1 DJ Booth (32 ROE MC-7H 7.5mm tiles)
Lasers:
8 Light Vector LV25 RGB lasers
Column & Delay Video:
4 Column Walls (6’ x 24’), 144 ROE MC-7H 7.5mm tiles
4 Delay Walls (10’ x 20’), 200 ROE MC-7H 7.5mm tiles
Northern Lights Tent
Lighting:
1 grandMA2 console
30 Claypaky Sharpys
8 Claypaky Sharpy Wash 330’s
Video:
1 Main Wall (40’ x 12’); 120 ROE MC-7H 7.5mm tiles
1 DJ Booth (35’ x 4’); 36 ROE MC-7H 7.5mm tiles
