Perry's stage, named after Perry Farrell, Jane's Addiction lead singer who started the Lolla phenomena in 1991, is now synonymous with the best of dance beats and sounds and this year headliners included Fatboy Slim.
Colour Sound's crew of seven was led by Kester McClure. On site, they all worked very closely with Festival Republic production managers Spike Beecham and Kevin Sutherland, and in fact it was their third gig this summer working with this same production team who are "Fantastic, really on the ball all the time and ensure that any technical support - plant, riggers, extra generators, etc. - is on hand exactly when you need it," states Kester.
The stage was located just inside the main Hangar at Templehof - with the audience on the outside of the building, and so flying was possible, and a German rigging team installed a mother grid from which Colour Sound then sub hung their main rig, the overhead elements of which were based on Fatboy Slim's design by Steven Abbiss.
This comprised 11 trusses, nine running upstage / downstage as 'fingers', with two side trusses.
A large expanse - 10m wide by five high - 100 panels - of Collour Sound's proprietary BT 7mm pitch LED screen - was hung on another upstage truss and the same screen was also used to clad the front of the DJ booth.
There were two diagonally hung side stage screens - hanging below the side trusses - made up from the medium resolution BT-12 product, both in 4m wide by 1m high strips, each consuming 60 panels - so 120 in total.
Out in the arena, each of eight PA delay towers was also rigged with 16 panels of BT-20 screen plus two Clay Paky Sharpys.
Back to the stage, and 20 x Sharpys per side and 40 active Sunstrips in total were all rigged above and below the side screens.
The overhead rig included 20 x CP Alpha Spot 1500s, 20 x 4-lite Moles and 20 Atomic 3K strobes, all spread out across the nine fingers. There were 26 x Robe Pointes up in the rig and on the floor and 42 Robe LEDWash 600s in both positions - floor and overhead.
On the floor to the sides were four La Novalight Nova Flowers - the new 2.5K units for some super-bright multi-beam effects. All of this came to life with some truly stratospheric atmospheric conditions produced by 8 strategically placed Jem ZR44s and a Jem Roadie heavy fogger.
To ensure that everyone's operating styles were accommodated, Colour Sound provided three options of lighting console - a grandMA full size, a ChamSys MQ60 with a Wing and an Avolites Tiger Touch requested by Abbiss to run FatBoy's show.
Video control was via a Hippotizer media server and also a laptop running Resolume that could be accessed via any of the consoles which were all running on a network. The video playback was looked after by Justin Beardsell from Meno TV.
(Jim Evans)
