Kaskade, Deorro, b2b, Seven Lions NGHTMRE…. The EDM Stars were out in force earlier this year for the Phoenix Lights Festival. This celestial quality was reflected in the Super Nova theme on the 120’ wide by 48’ tall stage on the Phoenix Raceway.

Lighting and production designer, Luis Torres brought it all to life with a brilliant, bold and fast-moving light and video shows spread out over a massive space craft looking, 100-foot wide rig that radiated light in every direction from strobes flown on a circular truss.
Washes lining the periphery of the circle that were interspliced with video panels created a breathtaking impression that the big stage was floating in space.

There was, however, more than an inspired lighting design behind this remarkable production. Putting together a rig of this size and complexity required no small measure of engineering acumen, ingenuity and team-building. We spoke to Torres about how he applied these skills to turn this visionary design into a reality.

This was an immense rig. How long did it take to load in?
“The complete load in, starting with structure and then production was a total of four days. The scaffold itself was a day and a half build. Production started the second day of the scaffold build, as the scaffold was being finished. This was a very tight timeline, but thanks to a great crew it was done on time.”

How many people were involved in this process?
“There was a total of 14 Techs for the show and about 36 stagehands that helped build the scaffold and then production.”

You must have encountered some challenges in bringing all this together. Can you describe them?
“The biggest challenge with this build was the tight timeline. It was also a challenge to manage the rigging of all the elements in a tight space due to only having the scaffold to hang off of.

“I worked with the team of engineers to come up with a way to share spammer trusses on top of the scaffold, so we could hang multiple points wherever it was needed. When sharing trusses, some motors had to be inverted, while some were down-hung. One of the biggest challenges with this rig was building the angled pieces on the stage left and stage right scaffold structures. It was a very big piece of truss with multiple lights. We had to use heavy machinery to be able to raise it all as one piece safely.”

This was such a massive project; we’re wondering where you started?
“We first built the center top three horizontal lines of truss, trimmed it out. Once that was done, we moved on the building the circle and taking up to trim. From there we build the next two rows of lights that surrounded the circle. Once that was done the bottom row of lights was a ground stacked truss structure. On the sides it was a very similar process.”

Thanks for telling us how it started, Luis! As far as how it ended, we already know: with an unforgettable and immersive experience for fans.