Ultra Music Festival Kicks Off 2016 Outdoor Festival Season

MIAMI — Financial backers for some EDM festival organizers may not be in a mood to celebrate this year. (SFX Entertainment, now operating under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, was delisted from NASDAQ on Feb. 10.) But interest in EDM among festivalgoers still appears to be robust. General admission tickets for the Ultra Music Festival, held March 18-20 in Miami, sold out by late January. The event once again kicked off the warm-weather outdoor festival season and kept production crews busy fielding new gear. Pictured here, Ultra’s Main Stage, with BMFL and Pointe fixtures from Robe.

SALT LAKE CITY — At the 2016 USITT Show, held March 16-19, Rosco Laboratories presented their eighth annual royalty check from the sales of Roscolux #359 Medium Violet to Behind the Scenes (BTS). This year’s $3,200 brought the total contribution since this program began to $21,548. Pictured here, from left, are Todd Spencer, Rick Rudolph, Rosco’s Stan Miller, Lori Rubinstein and Mark Heiser. Others supporting BTS during the show included the Long Reach Long Riders ($15K) and A.C.T Lighting ($5K).

CANTON, OH – For the annual ‘Love Is Red’ Christian youth conference, held at Faith Family Church March 3-5, 2016, Aaron Cole, the church’s lighting designer and director, leveraged the pixel-mapping capabilities of Nexus 4×4 fixtures from Chauvet Professional.

TORONTO – Decker LaDouceur, owner and director of the Toronto School of Circus Arts, relied upon BroadWeigh wireless load cell monitoring system to determine the maximum dynamic loads placed on a structure during a bounce for a bungee act. Using BroadWeigh load cell monitoring, the school was able to get accurate readings of the weight load that the performer placed on their rigging hardware and support structure overhead.

MIAMI – For the World Wide stage at this year’s Ultra Music Festival, LD Steve Lieberman of SJ Lighting used 36 Chauvet Professional Next NXT-1 moving LED fixtures to create a “fingers of light” effect. Lieberman positioned the Next NXT-1 panels on eight truss beams fanning out from the center of the stage, which was positioned on the side of the arch structure, rather than in the back.

NEW YORK, NY – The Long Reach Long Riders (LRLR) celebrated their upcoming ride through the Desert Southwest with a raffle and live auction to benefit Behind the Scenes during the USITT Conference in Salt Lake City last week. Sales of raffle tickets, some key donations, and sales of BTS and LRLR-branded swag raised over $15,000 for the charity. The LRLR 2016 ride, dubbed the Radioactive Ride, starts on June 4th in Las Cruces, NM. The riders cover all their own expenses so everything they raise goes to the charity.