18.11.2015 | Elation Gear Shines on El Paso’s Sun City Music Festival 2015

If you’re an EDM fan and live in America’s desert southwest, El Paso’s Sun City Music Festival (SCMF) is likely on your summer festival calendar. Held over Labor Day Weekend (September 5-6), both attendance and production values have grown yearly since the inaugural SCMF in 2011.

This year, some 40,000 EDM music lovers flocked to Ascarate Park in southern Texas to see an eclectic mix of acts, including EDM megastars Armin van Buuren and Hardwell, perform beneath a rig that included effects from Elation Colour Chorus™ LED battens and Elation Platinum Series moving heads.

The man behind the SCMF production and lighting design was Andrew Gumper of production house AG Light & Sound (www.ag.tc), who turned to Color Chorus 72™ LED battens and Platinum Spot 35 Pro™ moving heads to highlight the set design and create a level of visual excitement that brought festivalgoers into the experience.

The Main Stage rig was a spectacle of its own with a grid of diamond-shaped trusses hanging high above the DJ booth with two large rectangular-diamond shaped screens on each side of the stage and a massive LED screen backdrop. Each overhead diamond truss was lined with Colour Chorus 72 fixtures, Elation’s popular 6-ft long LED strip light that houses 288x 3W RGBA LEDs for a wide palette of color choice.

Each side LED screen was also lined with Colour Chorus 72s as was a truss structure that fronted the DJ booth that mirrored the diamond trusses above. Andrew, who has used the Colour Chorus LED battens before and says that he liked them, namely at 2015’s Electric Daisy Carnival Las Vegas where they were used extensively, employed the versatile battens at SCMF for colorful scenic looks and energy-inducing linear effects.

Also in the Main Stage rig and used to cut through with dynamic mid-air gobo and spot beam looks were Platinum Spot 35 Pros™, Elation’s feature-packed 800W moving head. The powerful spot fixtures worked from staggered bars left and right of the backdrop LED wall and along the side stage LED screens. Illuminating the set’s truss elements in shades of warm color were Elation Opti Tri 30™ LED Par lights.

Elation gear also featured on the festival’s other two stages with Platinum Spot 35 Pros and Opti Tri 30s lighting the Beatport Stage while Platinum Beam 5R Extremes and Platinum Beam 5Rs provided dense mid-air beam looks on the Bass Dunes Stage.

Designer – Andrew Gumper
Lighting Supplier - AG Light & Sound
Programmer/ Operator Main Stage – Josh Schultz
Programmer/ Operator Bass Dunes Stage – Alex Parayuelos
Master Electrician – Chris Harshfield “Blanche”
Electricians – Mike Galliger, Andrew Long
Video Lead – Robert Jones “JR”
Video Techs – Andrew Scalfini, Jason Fisher
Rigging Lead – Shawn Davila
Riggers – Russell Jacobs, Javier Ballesteros, Bear Blizzard “Hook”, Cristian Burdette “Loop”

Photos: Adam Kaplan - ASK Media Productions Inc