USA: It’s always exciting being involved in something new and innovative, so Nashville based lighting and visuals designer Chris Lisle was delighted to be invited by production manager Jim Dorroh of LEO Events to light seven performance stages at the inaugural KAABOO festival recently staged in Del Mar, California.
Chris specified 20 x Robe BMFL Blades as a major part of the lighting scheme for the Sunset Cliffs (main) Stage of the three-day event, a music ‘experience’ and a specially curated ‘sound voyage’, combining rock music and some EDM with comedy, incredible food, contemporary art, great vibes and premium amenities.
Chris worked closely with co-designer Erik Parker and assembled a hand-picked team of lighting programmer / operators to run and coordinate lighting for all the stages. Music headliners included The Killers, No Doubt, Snoop Dogg, The Zac Brown Band and many, many more.
The goal was to make each stage look different, dynamic and unique while keeping everything user-friendly for guest LDs.
Both Chris and Erik work as touring LDs and know the scenarios and the pressures of producing good shows in short timescales at festivals. “We wanted to make it as straightforward and satisfying as possible for visiting LDs in terms of them being able to clone / swap fixtures and provide a good layout of lights to give anyone arriving over the weekend the chance to have a great looking show,” he explained.
The 20 x BMFL Blades were positioned on one of the upstage trusses and used primarily for back lighting and as general effects lights for the Sunset Cliffs stage.
Apart from the brightness, Chris specifically selected them for the shuttering function which is ultimately useful for a festival set-up like this, together with the feature set which gives LDs the ability to create some vibrant and eye-catching effects with their compressed programming time.
Robe’s new BMFL Blade offers four fast shutter blades with smooth and precise movement, all individually angled and positioned within a frame which can itself rotate through 90 degrees for sharp or soft, precisely repeatable framing of projected images.
The fixture has two gobo wheels that can be combined with the animation wheel to create numerous funky effects, and other features include exceptionally smooth linear dimming; high definition colour mixing, full width beam and an output in excess of 250,000 lux at 5 metres, plus Robe’s EMS (Electronic Motion Stabiliser) technology.
Weighing just 38Kgs, BMFL Blades are ideal for festival set ups.
Approximately nine of the bands playing KAABOO’s Sunset Cliffs stage brought their own LDs, and the others were lit by ‘house’ LD / programmer Matt Shimamoto. Many of the guest LDs used the BMFLs for big backlight looks taking full advantage of the great optics and gobo selection.
Lighting on the Sunset Cliffs and Grandview stages was supplied by Solotech and included grandMA2 control systems, with the other four stages supplied by Visions Lighting.
Header photo credit: Brian Spady WireImage for KAABOO Del Mar via imageSPACE
