The massive EDM gathering, produced by Insomniac Events, celebrated its 20th Anniversary 3-6 September at the San Manuel Amphitheatre & Grounds in San Bernardino, California. Stage design for the Queens Ground and Sunken Garden stages was by production design specialists SJ Lighting with production company Visions Lighting, who has been involved in a number of top festivals this summer, supplying the lighting and video gear.
Southern California-based Visions Lighting has been involved with Nocturnal for over a decade and this year worked closely with SJ Lighting to create lighting atmospheres for Queens Ground and Sunken Garden that outshone even The Labyrinth main stage. "The brief was basically to push the limits," stated Visions Lighting president Todd Roberts. "Our goal was to bring the production and visual experience up to and hopefully exceed the quality of the Main Stage and I think we accomplished what we set out to do."
Queens Ground featured a huge scaffold structure whose visual centre comprised an LED circle display screen (7 mm) with four large and four small rectangle LED screen fingers (15 mm) emanating out in a 'sun ray' configuration. Outlining all of the rectangle screens and used as a direct view LED blinder were Elation Lumina Strips (12 per large, 4 per small), one-meter-long linear LED bars with ten individually controllable warm-white LEDs. Also lining the LED screens, including the large center circle screen and used for floods of colour as well as pixel looks, were Elation ELED QW Strips, one-meter-long strip lights with 18x 5W Quad RGBW LEDs. Alternating with the ELED Strips were powerful Protron 3K LED strobes.
Lining the downstage edge of the stage for colour looks were Elation's new Colour Chorus 72 LED batten wash lights, 6ft long LED strips that use 3W RGBA LEDs for a broad choice of shades, while compact Level Q7 LED Par lights were used to dress the truss in colour. Bright big beam looks came courtesy of Elation's Platinum BX moving head. Keeping the air sufficiently thick with fog and haze for better mid-air projection were Antari F-7 SMAZE effects and Antari F-5 Fazers. The engineering skill it took to safely distribute the loads to the scaffold, 40,000 pounds worth rigged using a series of spanner trusses and motors, is a testament to Visions Lighting's technical prowess. Lighting programming of the Queens Ground stage was by SJ Lighting's Steve Lieberman and Max Robin.
Nocturnal's Sunken Garden stage is known as the most energy intensive of all the stages at the festival and the lighting here was sufficiently dynamic to match. The somewhat small Sunken Garden tent was loaded with lighting in a sensory overload with a back wall of tiered 6mm LED tiles.
Lighting included Elation's flexible Platinum SBX hybrid moving head used over the audience on house trusses for spot, beam and even wash effects. Floor-positioned Platinum Beam Extremes directed their powerful narrow beams out toward the audience while EPAR Tri LED Par lights were used to give additional color to the space. Lighting programmer for the Sunken Garden stage was Visions Lighting's Brandon Dunning.
(Jim Evans)
