08.04.2016 | 500+ Elation Lights for Ultra Music Festival 2016

Described as “three-days of fast beats, loud drops, beautiful people, and so many lights” by Billboard, many of those luminaires used on Ultra Music Festival again bore the Elation Professional logo with well over 500 Elation products in action on several stages at Miami’s biggest EDM party of the year.

Some 165,000 people jammed into Miami’s Bayfront Park March 24-26 for Ultra’s 18th incarnation with unparalleled production backing performances by some of the world’s best DJs. Elation dealers AG Lighting, Zenith Lighting and Beachsound & Lighting were involved, supplying an abundance of Elation lighting for this year’s festival.

Both the popular Carl Cox & Friends Stage and Ultra World Wide Stage featured Elation gear with lighting design by SJ Lighting, Inc. and structure and production by AG Production Services. SJ Lighting owner Steve Lieberman delivered another memorable Carl Cox stage lighting design and used 111 of Elation’s six-foot Colour Chorus 72™ LED batten wash lights throughout the setup to highlight the spectacular truss design. Also for the Carl Cox stage, Zenith Lighting, Inc. supplied Colour Chorus 72 fixtures used as wash lights and to outline video pods.

“It was an aggressive in-your-face detail of the truss design that worked well,” Steve Lieberman says of the Colour Chorus fixtures. “They are durable and high intensity and fit our needs when detailing and highlighting a truss design, not just coloring it. It can do many things - subtleties, sine waves, and you can easily link the fixtures together. I also needed high numbers of fixtures and vendors have them which is a real benefit.”

Both the Carl Cox and World Wide stages used an abundance of Elation’s compact Opti Tri 30™ RGB PAR lights, 343 total, to emphasize truss in shades of warm color. It’s a fixture that Lieberman finds quite useful. “It has a small profile and great output for its size,” he says. “Instead of mounting it on the side of the truss it fits perfectly into 12” truss and makes for a clean detail aesthetically. And because it fits inside the truss if the focus is slightly off they still look good and you also get a nice reflection off of the truss aluminum.” With 1000 feet of truss or more in the design the need for an easy-to-use fixture was great. “I’m not using 10 or 20 fixtures,” he said. “We use 100’s of these lights and we’re often dealing with stage hands that might not have a lot of experience. The Opti Tri is easy to mount, easy to address and one guy can put twelve in a basket. It’s all about commodity.”

Also used on the World Wide Stage were 55 Elation ELED TW Strips™ and 33 Platinum Spot 35 Pro™ moving heads. “We needed something powerful to keep up with the rest of the rig and the Platinum Spot 35 fit our needs,” Lieberman explains. “I like the stock patterns in them: they’re real classic designs from the 90’s. They have great aerial geometric gobos with very clear definition and they look great up in the air with fog. They also have clarity of focus and a nice defined edge. I’ll shoot them in the crowd on occasion with something like a cone gobo. It gives them something to look at rather than just shoot a beam of light at the audience."

For NERO’s performance on the Live Stage, Zenith Lighting provided ACL 360 Bars™ for backlight and eye candy. Mounted on truss towers, the ACL 360 Bar’s output and continuous 360-degree movement were key features for Zenith, who has been doing lighting and video for Ultra the past five years. Zenith also provided a lighting floor package for Knife Party/Pendulum on the Main Stage with lighting design by Andy Hurst, as well as video for Knife Party. “Every year seems to be getting bigger and better when it comes to Ultra and we were thrown a lot of obstacles but we conquered all of them!” Zenith General Manager Adam Vidaurri commented. “All of our crew worked long hours to get this show going and I can’t thank them enough.”

For the UMF Radio Stage, Beachsound & Lighting provided Elation Colour Chorus 48™ LED battens, Platinum 5R Beam™ moving heads, Cuepix Panel™ LED matrices and ACL 360 Matrix™ moving head matrices while Elation Level Q7 IP™ RGBW PAR lights were used to uplight palm trees in front of the stage. Beachsound president and founder Andre Serafini commented, “Elation has always preformed magnificently for us, both in build and in service. We are happy to be part of the growing family.” 

Photos by Adam Kaplan, ASK Media Productions