Canada - Lighting a festival in a former power plant lends itself to electrifying images. The team at Onedot certainly thought so. They took this inspiration and flew with it during the three-day Lumen Festival that Produkt produced at New City Gas, a site that traces its roots back to an 1849 generating station.
The hard-edged venue in Montreal still bears witness to its industrial heritage, and the designers at Onedot smartly played on this evocative aura to create an intense, aggressive show that bristled with kinetic energy while supporting performances by Timmy Trumpet, Gordo, Adventure Club and other EDM stars.
Onedot's design team hung illuminated bars on kinetic winches down from the vaulted ceiling over the dancefloor. Crossing over the room, these bars added to the raw edginess of the performances, carving up the overhead space with pulsating lines of colour. The kinetic aspect also allowed the design team to shape and redefine the space at will during the performances. The Vibrant monochromatic washes that immersed the room also set a transformative mood. At other times, however, the room took on a darker, moodier tone, part of the designers' vision to cover a range of emotions.
The large video wall that dominated the stage took the potent looks to the next level. Divided into vertical sections, the stage video backdrop displayed captivating abstract geometric patterns. These patterns were often displayed in stark white against an icy blue background, which served to turn up the intensity level and embrace the visual signature of the festival.
Complementing the video element and tying it seamlessly to the rest of the room was a collection of 36 Chauvet Professional Color Strike M fixtures taken from CR34TE’s inventory. Almost half of the motorised strobe-washes were hung on vertical columns that ran between sections of the stage video wall. The remaining Color Strike units were arranged in the ceiling over the dancefloor.
"We positioned the Color Strike M units in an array to complement the powerful video elements on stage so we could continue the visual pattern throughout the room," said Onedot’s Jean-Sébastien Guilmette. "The Color Strike Ms served us well as strobes and as colour washes. We mapped individual pixels to create a wide variety of unique visual patterns. This really supported the video images very well."
