Proteus enhances Life is Beautiful Festival
- Details
Getting festivalgoers to use an alternate path however was no small task as the main street between the festival’s main stage and ancillary stages was lined with vendors and art installations, which naturally attracts people, and besides, the alleyway was a longer route, uninteresting and somewhat dimly lit.
“The festival came to us and asked us to make the alleyway feel cool and more exciting so people would want to walk that way instead of along the overcrowded street,” explains Ross, head of Rob Ross Design, a national full service lighting design and production company that handled site and VIP lighting for the 3-day festival as well as the art install project. “They were wonderful and gave us an open invitation to basically do whatever we wanted as long as we came up with something extraordinary that people would be attracted to.”
Life is Beautiful (Las Vegas, 20-22 September) featured headline acts Black Keys, Post Malone, Billie Eilish, Portugal The Man and Chance the Rapper.
Ross worked with New York composer Elisheba Ittoop to create a 10-minute soundscape, which was programmed to work with 66 Proteus Beam and 34 Proteus Hybrid luminaires. All lighting design and programming cameo was through Rob Ross Design. The Design Oasis of Davie, FL, provided the lighting equipment for the project.
The installation consisted of 10 arch trusses approximately 45ft apart from each other along the alley’s 450ft length. Each truss housed nine Proteus lights – Beams in the middle and Hybrids on the edges for gobo projection – along with a pair of haze machines. The 10-minute show looped continuously so the effect was of one never-ending light show with each truss having its own 1-minute theme for a 10-minute walk through the alley.
With rain seldom falling in Las Vegas one might wonder about the need for an IP65 weatherproof light but for Ross there was no question. “The IP65 rating was actually the leading factor in choosing the Proteus fixtures,” he says. “Even though it rarely rains in Vegas I wasn’t going to put 100 moving lights exposed on truss without some type of protection! You just never know.”
(Jim Evans)
