The festival has grown in size each year, with the Cream organisation constantly raising the bar in terms of line-up and production values. Technical event producer LarMac Live was once again called in by promoters Cream and Live Nation to liaise with the artists and deliver the premium technical production and high quality visitor experience that Creamfields audiences have come to expect.
To help LarMac Live deliver the largest Creamfields to date, PRG XL Video were brought in to supply video, lighting and rigging across the two main stages - Arc, and Horizon, together with video across six more stages around the 900-acre site.
PRG XL Video's head of rigging services, Q Willis, oversaw a team supplying the rigging across stages CF01 - Arc, and CF02 - Horizon. He explains, "During the design process we worked closely with Charlotte Scott and Igor Pacejs from Acorn Events who built the stage structures, ensuring that the rigging for video, lighting and audio was accurately assessed/plotted and installed as per the agreed plots."
Both of the two main stages - Arc and Horizon - had new designs this year. Arc was a curved structure, wider than last year's North Stage, extending around the audience to the sides and giving them a truly immersive experience. Horizon was a mix of varied height towers clad with LED, giving the former South stage a completely new look.
For the Arc stage Willis' team, led by Chris 'Karrit' Harris and Cleveland Brown, installed a truss system suitable for the opening show headliners Alesso. That system then formed the mothergrid for the second day's headliner, Axwell. A similar design was installed on the Horizon stage, with the team led by Stav Hanks and Kim Klusters, and that allowed them to efficiently change Avicii's design into Tiesto's overnight.
PRG XL Account Manager Gordon Torrington oversaw the lighting side of the project. On the Arc stage Torrington worked with Front of House operator, Chris Scott, and lighting crew chief, Aidan MaCabe, to specific the lighting for the giant curved wings, creating a look which would complement the artists' onstage lighting setups. For the Horizon stage the lighting design was led by the artists' requirements, and Torrington worked with crew chief, Luke Jackson, and Front of House Operator, Adam Power, to make sure their designs were delivered.
The design for the Horizon stage utilised 100 of PRG XL's powerful Icon Beam fixtures. The team also supplied a WYSIWYG suite on site at the festival, allowing the artists' lighting designers to test and refine their set-ups before the live sets.
A team of 14 lighting crew worked across the two stages, and nine trucks of lighting and rigging technology, including well over 1000 lighting fixtures were supplied to the Daresbury site.
PRG XL Video's account managers Paul 'Macca' McCauley and Jay Mobbs-Beal oversaw the video requirements across the stages, working to specify thousands of square metres of LED, media servers, and screen management systems, which filled 13 trucks with video technology
PRG XL Video's Paul McCauley comments: "Creamfields is one of the more challenging festivals we work on each year - purely because of the amount of equipment we ship to site. I was particularly impressed with the design of the Steel Yard structure as vastly improved the amount of weight loading compared to a traditional festival tent.
"The team from Creamfields and producers, LarMac Live, strive to make the show bigger and more impressive every year, and we're very proud to have played a part in helping the festival grow over the six years we've been supplying video to them."
(Jim Evans)
