The Feest in Het Park festival (AKA ‘Party In The Park’) is an annual weekend-long celebration hosted in the Reeshofpark, a large public park situated in the suburbs of the Netherlands city of Tilburg. Across two separate stages, more than 70 ADJ fixtures were supplied for this year’s festival by Ultrasound Productions, which utilized both moving heads and static washes to illuminate the performance spaces with vibrant colors and fill the sky above the park with impressive aerial effects.
Featuring DJs and live performers playing both traditional and modern party music from the Netherlands, Feest In Het Park is a truly joyous event. The 2023 installment began with a free party on the Friday evening before the main (ticketed) event ran throughout the Saturday afternoon and evening with performances from more than 25 artists. The festival then ended with a family friendly event on the Sunday afternoon, which wrapped up a weekend that saw thousands of Tilburg locals partying in the park.
Also based in Tilburg, Ultrasound Productions specializes in rental, sales and installation of lighting, sound, video and staging, equipment. The company was founded by Youri Laanbroek in 2005 to supply mobile DJ services but quickly grew into a full-service production company. Having bucked the industry trend and experienced growth during the COVID years, Ultrasound invested heavily in ADJ fixtures following the pandemic and is now busy supplying some of the region’s largest festivals and events.
Geert Maes, Ultrasound Productions’ Sales Manager, served as both Project Manager and Lighting Designer for the 2023 Feest In Het Park festival. Having first worked for the company almost a decade ago as an intern, Geert spent years working on site as a technician before transitioning into his current, predominantly office-based, role liaising with clients and creating designs, drawing, and visuals.
The main stage at Feest In Het Park 2023 was designed by Rudi Van de Schoor of Drawmore. He supplied drawing of the design, which provided the starting point for Geert’s lighting plot. The set involved a series of angled towers, covered with custom graphic panels and positioned at varying depths. Geert’s first challenge was therefore evenly illuminating the stage’s vibrant décor. For this he utilized 24 of ADJ’s popular 32 HEX Panel IP LED-powered wash fixtures, which were positioned in front of each of the stage’s graphical elements. Each of these robust units feature 32 potent 12-Watt 6-in-1 color mixing LEDs that can be used to create an almost limitless color palette ranging from bold saturated hues to soft subtle shades.
“I needed a tough, compact, IP-rated light that we could place on the floor and use to illuminate a large area,” explains Geert, “which made the 32 HEX Panel IP the obvious choice. It has a nice spread and great color mixing, which makes it my go to fixture for lighting décor on festival stages. It is also a very tough and reliable fixture. I know that, however many we use, they will all work for the whole show without any problems.”
The main stage also featured 16 of ADJ’s powerful Hydro Beam X12 dedicated beam fixtures, arranged across the stage set at various heights. Part member of ADJ’s Hydro Series of IP65-rated moving heads, the X12 is a feature-packed luminaire designed to create stunning aerial effects. Harnessing the power of the latest Philips® Platinum 12R LL MSD Discharge Lamp technology, focused through high quality optics, it creates a piercing beam of light with a tight 2-degree beam angle. It offers lighting designers a host of beam-shaping features, including motorized focus, a 16-position (plus open) stamped metal GOBO wheel, a 14-position color wheel, two rotating prisms (6-facet linear and 24-facet circular) and a frost filter.
“It was insane, they lit up the whole sky in the park,” enthuses Geert. “I was actually DJing one of the smaller stages at the other side of the site and you could clearly see where the main stage was because of the beams going up into the air, which was really cool to see. Even though we only used 16 fixtures, on what was quite a big stage, they were still able to fill the whole area. Sometimes you’ll see stages like this with way more beams, but I think it is true that less is more, at least in this case. Because this fixture has such a powerful output you don’t need to crowd a stage with fixtures to make an incredible show. With the right fixture placement, 16 was definitely enough to create a fantastic show.”
At the center of the stage was a truss structure, with a curved roof, covered in a Perspex canopy to protect the DJ position from any unseasonable rain. Across the rear of this structure the Ultrasound Productions team rigged eight of ADJ’s Focus Flex LED wash-zoom fixtures. Compact, quick, and punchy, this versatile moving head luminaire is capable of creating wash, beam and pixel effects. It is powered by an array of seven potent 40-Watt 4-in-1 RGBW color mixing LEDs and offers a motorized zoom function providing the versatility of a variable field angle of between 6 and 57-degrees.
“The Focus Flex is a great little fixture,” comments Geert. “I like its speed, its brightness, its zoom, basically everything about it! But what I like the most is its size, for such a powerful fixture it is extremely compact, which meant that we could comfortably fit eight on the roof canopy truss without it looking overcrowded – which wouldn’t have been possible with larger fixtures. They say size matters, which is true, but sometimes smaller is actually better!”
To illuminate performers across the front of the stage, six ADJ 15 HEX Bar IP linear LED fixtures were utilized. These robust, IP65-rated units each feature fifteen 12-Watt 6-in-1 color mixing LEDs and offer an even coverage with a 25-degree beam angle. To achieve a wider beam angle, each fixture is supplied with an opaque diffusion filter, which can be easily mounted above the LEDs simply by sliding it into a purpose-designed slot in the front of the unit. This, combined with the variable white color temperature control that can be achieved by varying the intensity of the cool white and amber LED chips, makes the fixture ideal for use as stage footlight.
In addition to the main stage, Ultrasound Productions also supplied lighting to the second ‘Foute Feestje’ stage, which featured a full roof canopy. Here Geert opted for eight of ADJ’s Vizi Beam 12RX dedicated beam moving heads, which are non-IP fixtures that feature the same light source and an almost identical feature set to the Hydro Beam X12. These were used together with 12 additional Focus Flex moving heads to create a vibrant lightshow of movement and color. Four more 32 HEX Panel IP fixtures were also utilized to illuminate banner panels located at either side of the stage, which after dark glowed impressively lit by a single fixture each.
From piercing aerial effects to colorful washes, chunky beams to illumination of the performers on stage, the significant quantity of ADJ fixtures deployed by Ultrasound Productions at Feest In Het Park served as the backbone of the festival’s lighting infrastructure. They enhanced the atmosphere on both stages during the day, but really came into their own after the sun set, lighting up the stages, as well as the crowds gathered in front of them, in vibrant colors and filling the summer evening sky with intense columns of light that could be seen for miles around.
Event: Feest In Het Park
Lighting Vendor: Ultrasound Productions: www.ultrasound.nl
Lighting Designer: Geert Maes
Stage Design: udi Van de Schoor, Drawmore
Photography: Laura Jacobs and Beau Rutten
ADJ Gear List – Main Stage
16 Hydro Beam X12
24 32 HEX Panel IP
8 Focus Flex
6 15 HEX Bar IP
ADJ Gear List – Foute Feestje Stage
12 Focus Flex
8 Vizi Beam 12RX
4 32 HEX Panel IP
