Well its over and maybe i am a bit late at writing this re cap but nonetheless what an amazing and trying experience! 

The journey was long and at points pushed me to my creative and physical limits, but the rewards were in the end worth it all. This is my third year working with the intuitve team and creators of EZNY Mike Bindra and Laura DePalma... We start speaking about the concepts and site layout about 6 months prior to the show, there production team works at this point almost year round obtaining permits, scheduling and building a site that consists of 4 stages, 85000 attendees, 100 performers and countless food vendors and staff. 

This year was unique in many ways as we were attempting to push the boundries of design for what is typically
known as a "festival design" or a one off in general. Four designs, of not only light but video, content, set, stage and lighting all unique within each other yet all cohesive based on the genre of music... Electronic Music that is.

I really feel that America is at the brink of a musical restructure , the label is dead, the artists can reach there audience via twitter, youtube or facebook, and artists are being found on the internet. Ok i diverge from the point of this article, but to bring it back to the topic at hand, this genre of music brings on new ways of creating a show. Here you have a "DJ" or in most cases Writer/Producer/DJ that stands behind the preverbial DJ table , spins his records jumps up and down waves his hands to the sky and closes his eyes when the beat gets harder or faster and thats aboyt it for activity on stage. The artist are usually by themselves, no band, no dancers, and most of the time restricted to being attached to his instrument aka laptop or turntables.

I tried in this moment to design with all of that in mind, where would the movement come from, how would i be able to bring a level of intimacy to such a large crowd and put them back into that club where the audience members could close there eyes and look up and feel the beat for the first time all over again.

I took my design cues based on the crowd for each stage, MADE EVENT does a great job at placing artists that have similar fan bases at each stage all day each day of the show, this enables me to taylor my designs, my selection of lighting operators and the layout of the stages to what i believe the crowd wants to see.

I decided this year one of the limits i would push was the content and media devlopment. Most shows would not invest as much time and creative direction in developing custom content for a festival, so these audience members unfortunately get stuck seeing stock content running out of "standard" industry media servers.. 

The design of the "Redbull Stage" was one of the main areas we focussed alot of energy devloping custom content. I worked with the amazing folks at Skitch TV  to graphically design the content for my visual design. William Heins was my lead director over there and we worked together to develop the look and feel of the content.  The idea for this design was a 3 dimensional cube made from LED tiles both exterior and interior LED that we would use as both a source and a set piece to map projection content on. I knew that proection mapping is widely popular now a days and potentially over used by corporations and artists but i had the concept to twist and use this idea in a new way. Not only were we using the LED product to project onto but the content that was played on the LED surfaces and the content that was used for projection was interactive to each other... I know thats possibly hard to grasp in first breath, but think of a cloud moving left to right on the projection content and it swiping perfectly in sync a night sky and moon ONTO the LED surfaces... haha Just watch the video above.. you will get it. 

Update***I also want to note that our hilltop design while i wont dive into it all that much here in this article was quite amazing as well, it consisted of a 90' wide LED wall that was self supported and bent in the middle the upper and lower walls together weighed about 11,000lbs and changed resolutions 3 times from center to outside from 9mm-28mm , the AMAZING content for this design was devloped by Bob Bonniol of Mode Studios whom worked together with myself to come up with custom content that was bendable and flexible to be used and triggered and affected within our playback system of PRG's Mbox Extreme... Check out the photo gallery to see more images of this design.. 

Anyway! I wont get into too much technical detail but that was just one of the concepts behind EZNY2011 it took around 3 months to fully develop and test and implement into a one off situation.. Imagine just figuring out how to playback any of this content in sequence with music you have never heard or been advanced... Thats where audio analysis was incorporated into some of the playback. Using an amazing programmer and the Hippo HD media servers we were able to do some amazing technical things that helped my mapping and content dreams come alive during the show.

I would like to thank all involved in this years show there are way too many of you to list here, from the production team, programmers, content developers and all of the amazing vendors a sincere thank you! 

Check the SLV DESIGN VIDEO BELOW!!! as well as the OFFICIAL EZNY2011RECAP VIDEO FROM MADE!

Also take a look at our Image Gallery of all of the stages at EZNY2011 and stay tuned for next years designs!