SAN BERNARDINO, CA – With more than 100 of the nation's top DJs pumping out tunes for 11 hours straight, Nocturnal Festival has become one of the premier electronic music events in the U.S. For the big main stage, Stephen Lieberman of SJ Lighting and Andrew Gumper of AG Light & Sound chose Elation Professional LEDs, moving heads and video screens. Produced by Los Angeles-based Insomniac Events, the one-day music marathon keeps growing. This year's festival, held at the National Orange Show Events Center, drew a record 42,000 electronic/trance/house music fans who braved the sweltering 100°-plus heat to listen and dance to Ferry Corsten, Steve Angello, Simon Patterson and Pretty Lights, to name a few.
The festival layout went large with six different stages featuring simultaneous performances, and the Main Stage venue, a tent-like enclosure, measured 400 feet deep by 156 feet wide, housing a stage and dance area inside.
Built by AG Light & Sound, (Ronkonkoma, N.Y.), the structure stood nearly 60 feet high and included a full wraparound mezzanine level. "The roof system that we built alone was about 65,000 square feet," said Gumper of AG, noting that it took 17 trailers of gear to construct the enclosure and stage, including 62,000 square feet of custom sewn vinyl, 75 1-ton motors and 450 4-by-8-foot stage decks. In truss alone, 12,574 feet was used – equal to 2.4 miles.
Lieberman handled the design of the stage and lighting (which was also supplied by AG Light). Although Lieberman typically designs 50-70 stages a year and has worked on many previous Insomniac Events concerts, he described the 2010 Nocturnal Festival's Main Stage venue as "the biggest structure I have ever done – and I've been doing this almost 20 years." Lieberman and Gumper chose Elation Professional LEDs, moving heads and video screens.
Four custom video screens, configured with Elation's EVLED 256 and EVLED 1024 low and medium resolution transparent LED video panels, were positioned on stage, two on the floor and two flown in the air. The screens were constructed to appear 3D-like in shape, wider at the base then getting more narrowly graduated toward the top, resembling steps constructed from individual cubes. The two overhead screens were inverted to resemble an upside-down staircase.
Lieberman said that when designing the screens he was inspired by the old video game "Q-Bert," which featured a color-changing pyramid of cubes. "For years, I had been wanting to do something that looked like Q-Bert, but I never had the opportunity. Then when I started doing my preliminary design sketches to see what was going to work for this environment, it popped into my head."
The 2-by-2-foot EVLED panels' light weight and modularity helped the crew construct the pyramid-shaped screens, while their brightness and durability made them well-suited for the challenging venue. Both rated at IP65 for indoor-outdoor use. The EVLED 256 features a 37.5mm pixel pitch and 2,000-nit luminosity, while the EVLED 1024 has an 18.75mm pixel pitch and 5,500-nit luminosity. The EVLED video screens were used onstage and also wrapped around the entire venue, with a total of 637 EVLED 256 tiles and 60 EVLED 1024 tiles deployed for the Main Stage tent.
Elation and its sister company Acclaim Lighting also provided much of the lighting featured onstage and in the dance floor area, with their gear accounting for nearly 200 of the 380 fixtures used in the venue. Twenty-four Elation 700-watt Power Spot 700 CMY color-mixing moving heads, which feature two gobo wheels and an animation wheel, and 24 of the company's 575-watt Power Wash 575-watt moving head washes, lit up the large dance floor area with atmospheric color and effects.
Ten Elation Design LED 60 TRI-Strips, each containing a total of 60 3-watt tri-color LEDs, were positioned onstage to serve as audience blinders. One hundred Acclaim X-Band 300 IP65-rated RGB LED wall wash fixtures were hung on all the truss tower legs "as kind of like eye candy," said Gumper. Toning the trussing itself were 40 Elation ELED B48 LED blinders.
Lieberman credited "a true collaborative effort" for bringing the sizable project together. "I was really impressed with AG – their entire team performed 100 percent. If any one piece of the puzzle is not done properly, it can affect everything."
An integral piece of this puzzle was the Elation lighting and video gear, added Gumper. "The products were rock solid. They worked great for the job. Everyone was happy."
For more information, please visit www.elationlighting.com, www.ag.tc and www.sjlighting.net.
