Electric Zoo is New York City’s premier electronic music festival, attracting over 100,000 fans to beautiful Randall’s Island Park each Labor Day Weekend. This year, the festival’s Main Stage featured a spectacular phoenix-themed design outfitted with Elation Professional lighting gear, including Lumina Strips™, Cuepix Blinder WW2s™ and the debut of the new Elation ACL 360 Bar™, all supplied by Burst Sound & Lighting Systems of Detroit (www.burstllc.com).
Now in its seventh year, Electric Zoo was revamped this year in an immersive zoo-themed atmosphere that included bigger stages, brighter lights and an overall recharged production. Their first year doing the festival, Burst provided lighting and rigging for all five stages, a 15 truck pull that included some 2000 moving lights and over 2000 feet of truss.
A highlight of the event and one of the animal-themed aesthetics that raised the bar at this year’s festival was a stunning phoenix design on the Main Stage that held large amounts of lighting and video gear. The spectacular bird, complete with head and spread wings, wrapped the stage and performers, including headliners Alesso, Above & Beyond and The Chemical Brothers, in an embrace of dynamic light.
The Main Stage saw the first use of Elation’s ACL 360 Bar™, a color-changing LED batten in the company’s new ACL Series of high-output narrow-beam LED effect lights. Some 200 units were used to bring the winged structure to life. “It’s an amazing fixture, very quiet and so fast that the Sharpy’s had a hard time keeping up,” stated Scott Ciungan, owner of Burst, who worked closely with Dutch design firms 250K and The Art of Light on the show. “They performed great across the five days. We had them going virtually 24 hours a day – they didn’t stop moving.” Availability in such large quantities was also important for Scott, who adds that he was also impressed with the fixture’s reliability. “These are brand new fixtures and we had only two failures out of 200 fixtures and that was in pre-production. The quality control at Elation is excellent.”
Four ACL 360 Bars were mounted in each of the mythological bird’s forty 30-ft feathers with additional fixtures mounted in the phoenix’s head. “It’s a very diverse fixture with a tight beam that looks great as an eye candy effect,” Scott said of the bar luminaire, which houses seven 15W RGBW LEDs. “We used them for anything from a single LED pinspot to a blade effect across the haze, which was really cool.”
Mounted on the pitch of the phoenix’s wings and throughout the structure for punches of bright white light were 64 Cuepix Blinder WW2s™, small yet powerful blinders with two 100W warm white COB LED modules. Also, fronting the DJ booth on the Main Stage were 40 Lumina Strips™, one-meter-long linear LED bars with ten individually controllable warm-white LEDs. Keeping the stage sufficiently atmospheric and the air properly dense with haze for mid-air lighting projection were Antari haze machines.
For their inaugural year working Electric Zoo, Burst had a positive experience and seemed wholly satisfied with both the event and the Elation gear. Scott concludes, “The event was extremely successful for us. It was our first outing with Elation gear and they performed well so we hope to have more on the horizon.”
Photos: Todd Kaplan
About Elation Professional
Elation Professional is one of the world’s leading lighting and visual solutions providers and is the global brand of Elation Lighting. Founded in 1992 and headquartered in Los Angeles, with European sales, distribution and support based in The Netherlands, Elation designs and manufactures a comprehensive range of innovative yet affordable lighting and video products that are distributed through a global network of dealers and distributors. Made up of a spirited team of dedicated personnel, Elation is setting new efficiency and performance standards in Platinum lamp and LED technology and is acknowledged for a comprehensive commitment to Total Support. As a company in expansion with a presence in a growing variety of market segments, chances are you’ve experienced Elation lighting at a concert, special event, TV, theater, late night venue, House of Worship, theme park, cruise ship, exhibition, architectural space or elsewhere. For more information, please visit www.elationlighting.com