Among the UK's most popular club experiences, a line-up including Richie Hawtin, Alesso, Annie Mac, Jamie XX, Fatboy Slim, Fac51 The Haçienda, The Martinez Brothers and literally hundreds more top artists, made the beats move and groove back at WHP's spiritual home, the Store Street arches underneath Piccadilly station
dbn's own WHP team was project managed by Pete Robinson.
The company has provided lighting design and equipment to the WHP phenomena since it first hit the scene nine years ago. The Store Street venue has a capacity of 1800 and the entire season from October to New Year's Day usually sells out in a matter of minutes.
The biggest technical challenge as always was getting all the production ready in the three hour time slot between the car park closing on Friday night and WHP's doors opening at 10bm. However this is also a process that dbn has honed to a fine art, with as many elements of the kit as possible left in situ during the week as the space functions as a standard car park.
In the Main Room, a series of trusses were hung in the roof on rigging points previously installed by dbn which have been chemically fixed and fully tested.
Three 6m long trusses over the stage fitted the space neatly and maximised the highest points of the arch, while four more trusses (two per side) ran all the way down the long sides of the room at about a metre out from the wall.
Upstage - flown off the back truss - were 84 panels of dbn's 12 mm LED screen, making one large surface area, however, the lowest two rows were designed to be detachable and could be used to clad the front of the rolling riser / DJ booth. This was the most common set up, but when bands played, a full screen could also be retained at the back.
Lower down, four panels of LED were removed and Clay Paky Sharpy beamers rigged in the gaps to shoot though the audience right to the back which always looked dramatic.
Also rigged on the rear truss were four Martin Atomic strobes and four 4-lite Moles.
The mid-truss had four Sharpys, four Clay Paky Alpha Spot HPE 575s and two 4-lites positioned on it. On the front truss were another four Alpha Spot HPE 575s, two 4-lites and six ETC Source Four Juniors for key lighting artists. Tucked around the stage floor - which was tight for space - were another four Alpha Spot HPE 575s.
The four room trusses were each loaded with two Alpha Spot HPE 575s, an Alpha Wash 300, one Martin Atomic strobe and four Showtec Sunstrips.
The fixtures on these trusses were also matched in the bar off to the side at the end of the room, effectively extending the dancefloor into this area as well.
All these lights were controlled via one of dbn's Pearl Expert Plus consoles. WHP supplied a selection of regular VJs, who brought their own front-end content and control systems, simply patched into the screens and ran their visuals.
Room 2 spun 180 degrees in orientation from the last WHP season at Store Street in 2012 and the stage faced the same way as the main room stage, an arrangement that worked really well for crowd flow and noise containment. Although the stage space was slightly reduced in this format, both that and public area actually felt much bigger.
A structure of trussing uprights was built behind the stage with a scaffolding grid anchored across it horizontally, and the DJ riser in front.
On that scaff grid, the design featured 19 Chauvet Nexus 4x4 panels all rigged on their diagonals which is trickier to do, but the architectural effect far more dynamic! There was a centre cluster of 3x3 Nexus panels and then five in an L-shape either side - all on their diagonals. Eight active Sunstrips followed the outside edges framing the Nexus panels.
An Avolites Tiger Touch was provided for control, with the Nexus panels and Sun
