More details from Visions Lighting (www.visionslighting.com):
After years of using Xenon searchlights for Coachella’s sight lighting with varying results, festival organizers looked to Visions Lighting to come up with a new and innovative solution. After seeing the new Platinum Beam Extreme from Elation, Visions’ Todd Roberts knew what would work to achieve their goal. Visions scheduled a demo at the event site several months prior to the festival. They put (8) Platinum Beam Extreme fixtures on the festival’s permanent site lighting structures (a.k.a “oil derricks”) and waited for the sun to set. It didn’t take long before Roberts and the festival organizers knew they had a winning solution as the night sky lit up.
With (15) towers, (8) Platinum Beam Extremes per tower, the final count for the project was (120) Platinum Beam Extremes lighting up the desert skies for the festival which hosted more than 500,000 attendees over the two weekends.
Signals from control were distributed by wireless solutions with DMX using four universes. All programming was done by Colin Feeney from a 40’ high scissor lift located right in the center of the festival grounds so that the entire rig was visible. Not only were the fixtures incredibly bright but operated 100% without failure, sustaining the extreme weather conditions including heat, wind, and rain. The end result: brighter and better perimeter lighting than years before while using less power and offering more creative options.
In addition to the Platinum Beam Extremes, Visions Lighting also replaced the conventional par lighting on the “oil derricks” with a combination of Elation Opti Quad Pars and Elation Q7 IP Pars, (16) per tower, which saved both power and cost by not having to replace lamps. The pars were used for functional and area lighting around the derricks.
In addition to the (15) towers with beams, Visions also supplied lighting to (15) additional towers in the event camping area. Each of their “oil derricks” were equipped with (5) Chauvet Nexus 4×4’s which illuminated an inflatable sphere housed in a geodesic dome on top of the tower. This design and idea was also the brainchild of Visions’ Todd Roberts. This allowed the festival production to change the color of the spheres throughout each weekend while added functional lighting to the vast space. Canin Campbell of Visions Lighting headed up the on-site team for set up of the system. Canin was supported by Daniel Baca and Steven Calley. All in all, the new site lighting set up for Coachella 2014 was a win-win for everyone involved.
