Visions Lighting supplied all the lighting, video, trussing, and rigging for the fleet of sci-fi robots that landed at EDC Las Vegas’ Basspod Stage, which was designed by Heather Shaw and her team at Vita Motus with lighting design by VT Pro Design. Todd Roberts, president of Visions Lighting who has been involved with EDC since its inception, says, “It was one of the most complicated builds I’ve ever been involved with, and the end product was just amazing.”
Each of the seven dirty robots had a set of antennae that glowed from the Elation Professional E Par Tri fixtures housed within. Visions Lighting also provided “[Elation Professional] Color Chorus Strip 72 lights that illuminated the actual scenic surfaces of the pods,” says Roberts. Over 400 Element Labs Versa Tubes were individually mounted onto the scenic pieces, which Roberts declares “was a great look.” Additionally, Visions Lighting supplied over 300 other LED and moving light fixtures. Brandon Dunning, who has worked on the Basspod Stage for over six years, programmed all the lighting in previz using Lightconverse.
The video build required that over 980 video tiles be individually mounted to 73 different video surfaces in custom built frames. “That was more [surfaces] than any other stage at the festival,” Roberts says. “The other stages may have had bigger screens, but there were maybe five or ten screens. No other stage had 73 separate surfaces where at one time there was different content on 73 different surfaces.” Each of the four small pods had twelve surfaces with a total of 48 among them, while the three main pods on stage had numerous surfaces with video on the legs of the main robot, a left and right video screen, and the DJ booth.
For audio, Basspod stage featured the world premiere of PK Sound’s new line array system Trinity.
Visions Lighting fabricated and provided 118 custom 45° corner blocks, over 200 spacer blocks, and over 700 individual truss sections. “That was another thing that was pretty crazy: the amount of spacer blocks because the trussing had to be all exact sizes to fit all the scenery,” explains Roberts. “Nobody had spacers that size so we had to build them.” Each robot pod required 78,000lbs of ballast, with 64,000lbs needed for the PA towers and another 32,000lbs of ballast for the video arches. It was the most ballast Visions Lighting has ever provided for a job.
With such a challenging design, Visions Lighting “came in four or five days earlier than we ever have,” says Roberts, “but it was a great experience. Everybody loved it.”