At its best, a design of any kind, isn’t just something to be seen and felt; ideally, it should also be something to interact with. The organizers of the popular Terminal V Festival, must have had this vision bubbling up in their collective imagination when they laid out plans for 10th edition of their annual event, which took place this April at the Royal Highland Centre. Taking their V2 Stage, a mainstay of the festival since 2017, they totally revamped it, turning it into a crisply angled 360-stage, making it “unrecognizable from years gone by.” The team at 19MIL, which designed the V2 Stage and the adjacent Terminal Stage were keenly aware of how important lighting would be to making both stages come alive in ways that would enhance the level of audience interaction with the impressive lineup of EDM artists appearing on them over the course of the weekend festival.
So, they called in Nick Jevons, award-winning lighting designer and president of Nick Jevons Designs Ltd. Working in Depence 3, Jevons created 3D renders of his design to share his vision for the V2 Stage and the gritty industrial look of the Terminal Stage. The results were impressive, but the actual lightshows even exceeded the already high expectations.
At the Area V2 Stage, Jevons had 20 CHAUVET Professional PXL Bar 16 motorized battens and 16 Color STRIKE M motorized strobe/washes supplied by Marc Callaghan and his team at Liteup. (“A huge shout out to them!” said Jevons.)
Jevons arranged the batten units around the bi-level central video screen that surrounded the DJ booth, and used the Color STRIKE M units to frame the video screens in the four corners of the expansive room. “I chose the fixtures to match the energy of music and festival — and they didn’t let me down,” said Jevons, who brought in Auratecture to run the Area V2 Stage, where Marlon Hoffstadt played his first ever show in Scotland.
The resultant lightshow contributed mightily to the vision of creating a closer connection between the renowned performers on stage and the crowd. Whilst the PXL bars made the DJ booth pop, drawing eyes to it. The bold light from the corners of the room funnelled attention even more intensely on the artists’ performances.
At the Terminal stage, where artists like FJAAK, DAX J and Riot Code performed, Jevons ran the show himself. He relied on 20 COLORado PXL Bar 16 to make the massive video screen stand out against a hard-edged background to create greater audience interaction. “I had 10 of the PXL Bars line the top of the screen and 10 line the bottom,” he said “They were the main element of my design in this setting.”
For the 40,000 fans who turned out for Scotland’s largest EDM festival, the two stages offered an opportunity to immerse themselves in a variety of performances, many of which pushed boundaries with new and revamped ideas… just like the production design that surrounded them.
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