Germany - Open Beatz is the largest open-air festival for electronic music in southern Germany and attracts tens of thousands of visitors to the 50-hectare site in Herzogenaurach, Bavaria, every year.
Performers on the five creatively designed stages in 2024 included Afrojack, Nicky Romero, Felix Jaehn, Lilly Palmer, and many more. Eventures GmbH was responsible for the lighting, sound, and video equipment on the three largest stages. Tobias Reinartz (visualprime) was responsible for the lighting design, working with the new Cameo Oron H2 Hybrid Phosphor Laser Moving Heads for the first time.
The Oron H2, which Eventures sourced entirely from NicLen’s dry hire stock, was the central element of the lighting design this year. “The Oron H2 is the brightest and most powerful beam moving head I’ve seen to date,” says Reinartz. “It offers everything you need for a festival like this: an excellent colour mixing system that doesn’t lose any of its assertiveness even with dark colours, plus fast movements, great gobos, and much more.”
Even during the programming phase, it became clear that the Oron H2 could fulfil the high demands. “The lights are always pushed to their limits during programming,” explains Reinartz. “Here we can already see whether a model fulfils the requirements or not. There was absolutely nothing to criticise about the Oron H2.”
As is now customary at the biggest international festivals, the Open Beatz Stages have little in common with a traditional stage. Instead, they are presented as individually constructed themed structures (in this case realised by Stageventure) that offer lighting and video designers a great deal of creative freedom.
For this reason, Reinartz’s motto was: ‘Keep it simple’. “We have numerous guest lighting designers and lighting teams at Open Beatz who need to be able to quickly get to grips with a lighting setup on-site. This aspect is often underestimated. It’s therefore important that not only I, but also all the other designers, can get the same quality out of the setup quickly and efficiently.”
Reinartz used the Zenit W600 Outdoor LED Wash Lights to illuminate the stages and audience areas. Here, too, the lighting designer proves that there is much more to consider in 2024 than just what is happening on stage: “Our aim is to work with the audience as part of the lighting design and to offer the many social media teams on-site the opportunity to take great pictures and videos. That’s also important.”
