The event's second year saw it expand to a capacity of 35,000 over two days, set against the backdrop of one of Scotland's best known natural attractions - Loch Ness. The line-up included the Chemical Brothers, Groove Armada, The Manic Street Preachers and Daft Punk.
HSL's crew chief Howard Dean led a team of 22, and they once again worked closely with event producer Jim King of Loud Sound Events and production manager Lee Charteris. HSL also sub-contracted ML Executives to supply audio to these two principal arenas.
Mike Oates, HSL's overall project manager comments, "The first thing we did was get two world class lighting designers onboard to look after the two stages - Andy Liddle on the main stage and Dave Byars in the Clash Arena."
The main stage was a low profile 12 metre Orbit - chosen for it's minimal impact of the natural beauty of the environment.
Lighting was rigged around the roof shape and Robe was the chosen moving light - 36 fixtures in total, a mixture of Robe ColorSpot 1200 ATs and ColorWash 700 ATs. Then there were 28 JTE PixelLines and 12 Martin Professional Atomic Strobes with colour scrollers, eight 8-cell blinders and 12 i-Pix Satellites. Conventionals came in the form of assorted bars of 4 PARs and ACLs, plus some ARRI 1K baby fresnels for front key lighting.
Liddle ran the show off a WholeHog II console and a Wing. Dimming was two Avolites 72-way racks, and power distribution was via one of HSL's custom soca distros.
The lighting rig in the Clash Arena included 52 Martin MAC 2K profiles and 24 MAC 2K washes, along with 12 Atomic strobes and 10 PixelLine 10544s and an assortment of 2 and 4-cell binders. There was an ART 48-way dimmer and the production rig was run off two Avolites Diamond 4 consoles.
HSL also supplied a small self-running lighting rig to the Bollywood Bar, a tented arena away from the main stages featuring a raft of international DJs. This consisted of eight Robe LED 136 Wash lights, four Martin Mini-MAC profiles and 24 sections of Pulsar ChromaStrip. All fixtures were ground supported on tank traps, built around the DJ booth and run from a Hog 2 console in stand-alone mode.
Main stage sound was supplied via an L-Acoustics VDOSC system with Midas consoles at both ends of the multicore, while the Clash Arena featured a Funktion One Res 5 system, again with Midas XL4 consoles.
(Jim Evans)
