Sydney Australia-based lighting design house Mandylights was responsible for the design, programming and operation of the main stage at Miami’s Ultra Music Festival. The world’s largest and most well-known electronic dance music (EDM) festival, staged over six days drew a staggering 380,000 partygoers and featured what was arguably North America’s largest ever festival lighting design and technical setup.
Mandylights lighting designer Richard Neville and Associate Alex Grierson used well over one thousand intelligent fixtures to light the stage which was some ninety metres wide and thirty metres high and featured water fountains, twenty automated video-clad stage lifts, an extravagant automated set of ‘doors’ that tracked upstage and down and the first use of ABB automotive robots at a festival. Working closely with producers James Klein of James Klein Events and the legendary Bruce Rodgers of Tribe Design, Inc., Neville and Grierson were able to create a lighting design that placed lights in every possible position to highlight and exaggerate the amazing design of the stage.
“It was a pleasure to throw the tired old festival concept of four straight trusses out the window” commented Neville. “The UMF 2013 main stage design was all about re-defining what could be done at a festival so all elements – lighting, automation, staging, pyrotechnics and video were designed with the common goal of making something spectacular, completely new and never before seen.”
Over nearly four months of involvement with the design, Mandylights created and drew the entire design in-house, before employing their visualisation software for both pre-production renders for their client and pre-programming which was carried out in their Sydney studio and in a mobile studio on site in Miami.
The city of Miami was hardly ready for the size of the stage and lighting at this year’s festival with programming shut down by police on the first night citing that the lighting was responsible for illuminating much of downtown Miami. Fortunately, the on-site Mandylights visualisation studio featured a highly accurate model of the stage which included all of the scenic design elements and even simulated full automation elements so that lighting could be programmed with unprecedented accuracy.
With a stage design and staging elements that had never been seen before on such a large scale, Mandylights was excited to continue this design theme throughout the lighting rig. Neville and Grierson employed almost a hundred new TMB Solaris Flare strobes; an LED strobe fixture of incredible output that not only has full colour mixing, but can also stay illuminated indefinitely without the decay of a normal strobe fitting. Also featuring heavily in the rig was the new Robe 100 LED Beam with 176 scattered across the front of the set. All of these elements combined with Krypton KR25 panels, Novalight Supernova flowers and hundreds of other fixtures to create a design that was able to consistently produce new looks for every artist.
Ultra’s main stage played host to the world’s most famous DJs; Tiesto, Avicii, Armin van Buuren, Deadmau5, Steve Aoki, Alesso, Above & Beyond, David Guetta, Fatboy Slim and Calvin Harris were some of the thirty plus artists featured and the epic Swedish House Mafia played their final show ever on the final night of the festival. Neville and Grierson’s design and operation played a key role in redefining the expectations of a demanding crowd as to how a main stage can look and react at such a high-profile event.
Fixtures: 124x Vari*Lite VL3000 Spot, 32x Vari*Lite VL3500 WashFX, 76x GLP Impression X4 Wash, 121x Clay Paky Sharpy (including 20x Chrome finish), 176x Robe 100 Beam, 89x Robe 600 LED Wash, 25x Robe 1200 LED Wash, 87x Solaris Flare LED Strobe, 67x Martin Atomic Strobe, 60x Color Kinetics ColorBlast 12 RGB, 63x Color Kinetics iWhite LED, 30x Color Kinetics ColorBlaze 48, 25x Color Kinetics ColorBlaze 72, 40x Elements KR25 Panel (similar to a Jarag Panel), 27x 4way Molefay, 6x Supernova, 3x Gladiator Follow Spot, 4x MDG Hazers – The One, 8x Jem ZR44 Fog Machines, 6x GrandMA2 Full Size Consoles (2 primary, 2 backup, 2 in visualisation studio), 2x HighEnd Systems Road Hog Full Boar (Deadmau5 only), 12x GrandMA2 NPU (6 active, 6 backup).
Equipment
Head Systems: Geoff Huey
FOH Technician: Alex Ares
Production Credits
Lighting Design / Programmer: Richard Neville
Associate Design / Programmer: Alex Grierson
Producers: James Klein Events (James Klein) and Tribe Design (Bruce Rodgers)
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