At the end of each day's performance the festival's video wall, which was made of PVP X6IP LED panels from Chauvet Professional, was taken down, reassembled and repositioned to give the stage a fresh new look that fit the needs of the next day's headliner band. "It's a good thing the panels are so easy to rig, because we had to take them down and put them back up on a daily basis," said Tim Messina, owner of Events United, which supplied the video walls for the festival.
"In the past we've done audio and lighting for multiple stages at SoulFest," he said. "This was our first year doing video for them. Traditionally, the video wall at the festival had been off stage, but I suggested we try building the wall onstage. The SoulFest staff loved the idea. There was one catch however; we would need to fit the video wall to each headliner's specs for each night of the festival."
With the video wall being on stage, each evening's headline band had its own vision of how to use it to enhance the show. This led to the decision to create a new wall configuration every night. "Changing the wall configuration on a daily basis led to some great visuals," said Messina. "Fortunately, the PVP X6IP panels are so easy to rig that this idea was very doable. There are a lot of fantastic user-friendly features to these panels. For example, the T handle lets one person hang the panels quickly, easily, and safely."
Working with the headlining bands' teams, Messina and his crew developed an impressive variety of video wall configurations, some of which tested the performance capabilities of the PVP X6IP panels - tests the panels invariably passed with flying colours. This was evident on the first day of the festival, when the Grammy-nominated group Newsboys called for a very wide 80-panel wall.
"The Newsboys' wall was close to an anamorphic ratio," said Messina. "It measured 26ft wide by 8ft high. We were concerned by this ratio because we were putting IMAG up on this wall for the opening acts."
In the end, everything turned out fine. "The video wall on day one turned out to be awesome," said Messina. "It gave our IMAG shots a new look and feel. We had a lot of compliments on how amazing it looked. On day two we had to move the wall side stage for Casting Crowns, and on day three we made another wide ratio for Third Day with slightly different dimensions."
(Jim Evans)
