Take a trip around the world sampling summer music festival projects—and the lighting designers that support the music.
NYC’s Pride Island Concert
Pride Month in New York City was full of festivities as thousands turned up the heat and stepped up the beat for all things Pride. Commemorating the anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall Riots, New York City has a reputation for doing Pride Month like nobody else, and this year’s events did not disappoint. With street fairs, culinary excursions, dance parties, and the famous Pride March, the festivities culminated with Pride Island, a music-festival experience featuring live performances at Brooklyn Army Terminal (BAT).
PRG, a leading production solutions provider for live music events, partnered with Live Nation to provide gear and production services to realize this memorable event that featured headliner Christina Aguilera. To help overcome logistical challenges inherent to the event’s setting on an East River pier, which included access to the site, unpredictable weather conditions, and on-site power, Craig Goetsch, Live Nation Production VP, reached out to Jim Lehner, Sr VP, Global Special Events, PRG. “Live Nation trusts us for our production management skills, our multi-discipline expertise, plus, in this case, our knowledge of potential code issues with the Fire Department and the City of New York,” said Lehner. “We provided technical design services, a supervisory crew, rigging, audio, lighting, and a video system that included an upstage video wall, and two large I-Mag screens, and a camera package.”
Last year’s Pride Island event on Governor’s Island was smaller in size and used conventional staging. This year the event was moved to BAT to accommodate larger crowds. A semi-trailer served as the main stage, with wings that traveled on the trailer added to each end. This allowed the stage to be driven onto the pier, saving the load in time that would have been needed to build a traditional stage.
Pride Island’s Lighting Designer, Teddy Sosna, had many decisions to make regarding the rig design and coming up with creative solutions that worked for the DJs during the day and for Christina Aguilera, in the evening. Sosna said of PRG, “They’ve been fantastic. I really wanted to use the VL3600s because they’re bright as heck and IP rated. But they’re still fairly new, so I wasn’t sure we’d be able to get them—but PRG had a gazillion of them, and they were fantastic. It’s just a really good hard edge fixture.”
Aguilera’s Lighting Designer Cat West prefers a clean aesthetic and likes to add something new to every design. For Pride Island, she chose the JDC1 strobes from GLP which combine a powerful strobe effect with LED pixel mapping. West said, “Christina’s music is so elaborate, and there’s always so much happening when she’s performing on stage. For Pride, we were able to rent from PRG, the JDC Lines, which are still fairly new and we haven’t been able to find them anywhere. I was really glad that we had them here. We had soundcheck in the morning, we had everything running and even in full daylight, she could still see everything. She could still feel those hits. Something like that really allows us to play and have fun and just really be part of the music.”
Sad Summer Festival’s Taking Back Sunday
Lighting designer Eric Price went with an all-purpose floor package for rock band Taking Back Sunday as they headlined the traveling Sad Summer Festival in the U.S. Reminiscent of the legendary Warped Tour, the fourth incarnation of Sad Summer Festival ran coast to coast and featured a strong lineup of pop punk’s finest bands. Price has been with Taking Back Sunday since 2017 and served as Lighting Designer, Programmer and Operator for the band’s Sad Summer set.
He noted that for the Sad Summer tour the band wanted a more theatrical design feel, something that would allow them to move to different positions during the show. The result was a cleaner, more streamlined stage that featured a series of risers that the band could move between on stage. Besides the drum riser, a 20’ wide x 4’ tall upstage graded riser acted as both a performance platform and runway leading down to a 4’ x 4’ midstage vocal riser with dual staircase.
Price selected the Elation Proteus Lucius™ as the feature light of his floor package, having used the Proteus Lucius before on a tour with Mastodon, and knew the all-purpose LED moving head well. “The Proteus Lucius is great technology with a lot of features and you don’t lose anything with it being IP rated,” he said. “It makes no feature compromises. Being a rated weatherproof light, I was impressed with how quick they are, the pan/tilt, the optics, and things like that. They were very responsive and really friendly to work with programming wise.” Jason Reberski, CEO at Chicago-based JRLX, Inc, lighting vendor for the floor package, agreed, stating, “It’s a solid fixture in every category but here’s the silver lining—there are zero downsides to the fact that it’s weatherproof. The IP65 rating is simply a bonus that makes it even more versatile. It really is a ‘do-all’ fixture.” Taking Back Sunday’s flown package for the Sad Summer shows was supplied by LIT Lighting out of Tempe, AZ.
For the tour, the Proteus Lucius rode on four quick-to-deploy, custom set carts that butted up to the runway riser, a seamless height connection that Price says made it look as if the fixtures were on the riser but were actually just upstage of it. “There was enough depth to the stage that I could just clear the risers but could come down through the band without going right into the front row,” the designer said. “I could do low intensity beam looks into the audience from there or point them up over the crowd and into the sky.” The Lucius fixtures also flanked an illuminated set piece, a custom LED neon sign of the band’s logo that would emerge between the set carts.
Being an outdoor show with haze difficulties due to the elements, Price often had the fixtures narrowed down for ambient-busting, eye-catching beam looks. “It’s sometimes hard to pull off a show in the elements with the wind and ambient light but the Lucius held up just great and really punched through.” He also took advantage of the multi-functionality, often accessing the Lucius’s three gobo wheels, sometimes to complement special effects like low fog. “There were some looks I was really happy with as the low fog came through the risers on to the band,” he explained. “Here I pointed the Lucius down into the fog for some fun beam effects, breakups, flower patterns, and other great looks. I love the classic cone gobo and had fun making some split color wheel cone looks or two-tone laser-etched beam looks. Other times I zoomed the fixtures out for wide washes or prism looks, and I even used them glowing at low intensity for eye candy.”
Of course, doing outdoor shows in grilling heat and never really knowing what the weather will be like, the Proteus’s proven IP65 rating was also a key factor in its choice. “They sat out all day in the summer heat—up to 108° for the Texas shows—with no issues to report. I, however, tried to spend as much time as possible in the air-conditioned bus,” Price concluded.
Hellfest 2023 in France
One of the biggest heavy metal music festivals in the world, Hellfest recently wrapped its 16th edition in Clisson, France where KISS launched the four-day festival that featured 180 bands performing on six stages in the concert area plus additional outdoor stages. KISS, Iron Maiden, Mötley Crüe, and Slipknot headlined as more than 150,000 extreme music fans attended performances, camped out and explored the full Hellfest 2023 experience.
Getting the festival off to an electric start, Lighting Designer Sean “Motley” Hackett selected Claypaky Xtylos for the two-hour KISS show. The compact beams, equipped with a RGB laser source, were placed on the floor of Main Stage 1 where they gave the show a futuristic dynamic thanks to the fixtures’ extremely fast Pan-Tilt movements. A spectacular set design and a fireworks display ended the KISS concert on a high note. The legendary band is continuing its End of the Road farewell tour, on which they also deploy Xtylos fixtures.
The France-based B Live Group has been Hellfest’s technical partner from the start of the festival providing lighting for both of the main stages and the Warzone. This year, they chose Claypaky Sharpy X Frames to illuminate Main Stage 2, which hosted the biggest international bands, and Arolla Profile MPs and Sharpys for the Warzone, the stage dedicated to punk bands. At B Live Group, Cyrille Dupont is the Project Manager and Designer and Sébastien Sacco the Network Manager. Dimatec is Claypaky’s lighting distributor in France.
Festival Lent in Slovenia
Early this summer, the city center of Maribor was transformed into a large festival area for music, art and culture. Festival Lent is the largest open-air festival in Slovenia and one of the biggest city center festivals in Europe. Also, for the 30th anniversary, national and international artists performed on the numerous large and small stages, including this year’s Eurovision Song Contest participants Joker Out, as well as funk legend Fred Wesley. To stage the broad spectrum of genres, the lighting designers of the respective stages relied on an equally versatile range of moving lights, LED bars, and flood lights from Cameo.
On a total of five of the seven stages, including the Main Stage, Jože Skarlovnik, Technical Director of the festival, relied on Cameo fixtures. The focus was primarily on IP65 rated outdoor spotlights, with which those responsible did not have to make any compromises in terms of performance, weight, and flexibility, even in inclement weather. In addition to the OTOS H5 IP65 Beam-Spot-Wash Hybrid Moving Heads as floor lights, the ZENIT W600 SMD with Pixel Control also played to their strengths as strobes and eye-catchers on the Main Stage.
Anže Trstenjak, Lighting Designer of the band Joker Out, was also enthusiastic about the OPUS X Profile moving heads, which provided plenty of dynamics as backlight and effect light with powerful gobos and animations: “The performance of the OPUS X Profile is impressive.” Dorej Val Škaper, Lighting Designer for Slovenian folk-rock musician Vlado Kreslin, also thought the OPUS X Profile belonged on every stage: “The quality and precision of the beams and colors blew me away, and I would be happy to see the OPUS X Profile more often in Slovenia.”
On the Večer Stage, the PIXBAR 600 Pro LED bars immediately caught the eye, mounted both in the stage backdrop and on the front arched truss construction—here as an IP65 version—and providing powerful colors, strobe, and chase effects. In front of the jazz stage, meanwhile, Gašper Bohinec was at the lighting desk—and relied on the versatile PIXBAR 600 Pro LED bars. Gašper’s personal highlight, however, was the compact and lightning fast AZOR S2 Spot Moving Head, which he called “the perfect choice” as a show light for the highly acclaimed shows by Fred Wesley and French drum legend Manu Katché.
Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival 2023
4Wall Entertainment worked alongside Production Designer Chris Lisle, the owner of Nashville-based CLLD, LLC, to provide a lighting and video rental package for The Other Stage at the 2023 Bonnaroo Music Festival. The four-day music festival, situated on a 700-acre farm in Manchester, TN, hosted roughly 85,000 music fans and featured performances by some of the biggest names in music. With stars like Zeds Dead, STS9, Louis The Child, Subronics, Liquid Stranger, Walker & Royce, and Alesso, The Other Stage at the Bonnaroo served up plenty of EDM firepower.
Lisle’s design, which included 325 CHAUVET Professional fixtures, gave the visiting LDs all the punchy output they could ever ask for, as well as ensuring versatility to support a variety of looks, while also possessing the strength to stand up to large, multi-surface video walls and a video ribbon that ran across the roof of the stage. The Other Stage’s lighting rigs were highlighted by three circular truss structures equipped with dozens of CHAUVET Professional COLORado Solo Battens, CHAUVET COLORdash PAR H7IP LED wash lights, and Elation Proteus Hybrid moving lights. For the stage video backdrop, roof video ribbon, and stage left/right video walls, 4Wall provided 144 ROE Visual CB5 LED video panels, 270 ROE Visual CB8 LED video panels, and the entire Brompton Technology LED processor system. “I’m super proud of how The Other Stage production design came out,” said Lisle. “4Wall absolutely crushed lighting and video on this one. One of the best festival rig preps that I have ever seen.”
4Wall Account Executive, Robby Kurtz, expressed great satisfaction with the remarkable teamwork between Chris Lisle and 4Wall during their collaboration for the stage, “Working with Chris was a fantastic experience, as always,” said Kurtz. “His designs are always fun and unique, providing EDM LDs with an array of tools to work with.” He continued, “We invested a significant amount of resources in IP fixtures and LED video products, and when the weather came up, we rested easy knowing that the show could go on no matter how wet things got. With our 4Wall Lighting and LED team at the helm, we were able to host a successful and memorable event despite the inclement weather conditions. The crew’s efficiency and ability to adapt to unforeseen circumstances were impressive, and they demonstrated the utmost professionalism throughout the festival. With so many moving parts involved in a festival like Bonnaroo, it’s no small feat to pull off a flawless event, but our technicians did it with ease.”
The Other Stage was also home to 4Wall’s ‘Previs & Chill’ experience provided by 4Wall and ACT Entertainment. This previz production trailer was set up stage left of the stage and offered incoming lighting designers the chance to relax in an air-conditioned room and update their show files on the included MA Lighting grandMA3 full-size console and WYSIWYG suite. “We were so excited to bring Previs & Chill to the farm this year,” said 4Wall Account Executive, Tyler Bevel. “It provided incoming LDs with an incredible technical advantage, but more importantly, it allowed us to celebrate the amazing community we work in. Spending quality time together and unwinding from constantly being on the road was a refreshing experience. It’s truly special to be a part of such a connected community, and I am eagerly anticipating where we go next.”
Along with Production Designer Chris Lisle, the team included C3 Director of Production Brandon Sossamon, Lighting Director Nick Stabile, and Production Rigger Eric Chabira. The 4Wall team included Project Manager Gabe Thruston; LX Crew Chief Matt Weede; LX Tech 1/Console Operator Jason Blasing; LX Techs Benoit St-Aubin, Ryan Waldron, Jake Riddell, and Ian Mellon; Video Crew Chief Eric Wallace; Media Server Lead/Content Op Alex Fuentes; and LED Techs Stephan Peters, Skip Hutton, Chris Rodgers, and Ben Catella.
Lisle was pleased with how the visiting LDs liked the end result of the design for The Other Stage. “Their feedback was pretty positive,” said Lisle. “We gave them a lot of toys in the toybox to play with… and the folks in the audience seemed to have fun as well.”
A (Brown) Note on Weather
By any measure, summer 2023 in the U.S. has been extreme with intense heat, severe rainfall, and unrelenting smoke. So, when a number of outdoor festivals and events are on the program, the challenge for any production company is immense. “This is a very current issue,” stated Ryan Knutson, President of Brown Note Productions in Colorado. “We’ve seen some really intense changing weather patterns and IP fixtures have become critical in outdoor applications.”
Knutson credited Danny Wimmer Presents for initiating their move to weather-resistant lighting solutions, a client they have worked with since 2014. “DWP was really the first client we worked with who stressed that the dynamics of weather and shows had changed and therefore a change was needed in how we approached these events. Specifically, we needed to stop the behavior of plastic bagging fixtures whenever there was inclement weather,” Knutson said, remarking that there were both efficiency and environmental issues to consider. “Not only is it stressful for the crew with hours of additional work but we’re messing with our environment by using hundreds of bags that just end up in the landfill. They trusted us to find a solution and that solution was IP rated fixtures.”
Brown Note began making the change in 2019 when they added Elation Professional’s Proteus Maximus™, Proteus Rayzor 760™, Protron Eclypse™, and DTW Blinder 700 IP™ to their inventory, all IP65 rated luminaires. Since then, they have supplemented their stock with several IP rated lights including the powerhouse Proteus Excalibur™ and Proteus Brutus™, which, Knutson said, are especially useful to power through ambient lighting from video walls. “Every year we’ve put more and more Proteus on shows and now every single piece we have on an outdoor show is IP rated,” Knutson commented. “It’s saved my crews hours and hours on site and in some cases has saved my client from having to shut down a show.”
This summer has been particularly eventful for Brown Note, as they successfully utilized their Proteus units at various DWP festivals, including Welcome to Rockville in Daytona Beach, FL; Sonic Temple in Columbus, OH; and Inkcarceration Festival in Mansfield, OH. Add to that the 150 shows or so they work each year at Red Rocks Amphitheater, the iconic outdoor venue west of Denver that often sees torrential downpours, and it’s clear that Brown Note’s expertise and equipment have proven essential in ensuring top-notch concert experiences.
“When weather comes in we think about being safe from the wind and from lightning, but we no longer have to worry about water damage to the fixtures. It takes an element of stress out of the jobs for our crews who already work crazy long hours onsite and of course it has the benefit to the client that the show goes on.” There have been so many pluses, Knutson continued, noting that the QC process has also become much easier as they are not forced to quarantine fixtures for days in order to dry them out or spend money and time repairing or replacing a lot of often expensive parts. “We just don’t have weather created damage anymore.”
The transition to IP rated fixtures has brought numerous benefits to Brown Note, their clients, and the industry as a whole. However, Proteus goes beyond weather protection. “We didn’t want these lights to just be an outdoor thing for us,” Knutson said, explaining that they wanted feature rich, high quality lights that they could spec for any event. “This meant we were looking for features first, diving deep into the things that are important to our clients. In fact, I have had headliners who decided not to bring in their own rigs because when they see what our IP lights have to offer, they say ‘that will work great.’”
