Maxedia at Nature One Rave in Germany

Each year in early August a defunct US Army Pershing missile site in Germany’s Hunsrück Mountains is transformed into the country’s biggest and most popular outdoor Rave, Nature One. This year marked the tenth anniversary of the festival (8 years at this site) and, as is the norm, some 60,000 ravers from all over Europe were in attendance.

The event was one of the first outings for Martin’s new Maxedia Digital Media Composer. Lighting and set designer Martin Kuhn, who has handled lighting design duties at Nature One for the past eight years, opted to try the new media server.

“As the main challenge of this show is to do something innovative, every year I look around for new products to incorporate into my show,” he commented. “This year at the Frankfurt trade show I visited the Martin booth and met Dean Price (veteran lighting designer/operator and senior consultant with the Martin Maxedia) who pulled me over to the Maxedia demo. After a short while I recognized the potential it would have for my show and decided to push forward. It then became a part of my design structure to incorporate video surfaces/projection that I could use with the Maxedia. Dean, Peter Kroul and others at Martin Professional Germany were committed to supplying me with a machine and technical support.”

A visual show
The large festival area is divided into different floors, tents and “bunkers”, which were the original launch pad storages. Festival promoter, I-Motion, stages 5 areas while 17 clubs from all over Germany take over the smaller spaces to host their own Nature One parties. In total there were more than 300 DJs and live acts from 25 countries. 

Martin’s duties were many. Besides lighting, set design and visual concept responsibilities, he also operated one of the lighting boards, Maxedia, E:CUE, G-LEC and Syncrolites. “I wanted to get away from a light show and make it a visual show. As I wrote the lighting brief I just had to make sure all the video equipment fit into the budget. Due to my responsibility for the overall look I also wanted to be at the control side of the lights and video to make sure it was in sync – both aesthetically and time wise.” 

Maxedia
The Open Air floor is the largest and technically most advanced floor at the festival. As the resident designer for the last eight years, Martin creates an original design each year with a host of visual gimmicks thrown in to surprise. “This year - the tenth anniversary – had to be somehow special and I decided to use as much video and LED as possible,” he states. “The final choice was four tandem projections on the PA Towers, a single circular projection on the stage, plus a 16-frame G-LEC wall at the center of the dance floor, all driven by Maxedia.

“Maxedia offered me more possibilities and more creative potential than other comparable products and when I first saw it, it looked so user friendly that I didn’t have to fear too steep a learning curve to use it on the show. This first impression later proved to be right – it was very easy to use. As I am responsible for the overall design, which includes stage, set, lighting and video, I need to share my attention with all of them, and if I had a complicated piece of equipment this would be very counter-productive.

“With Maxedia I could integrate video seamlessly into my visual concept and I did not have to explain at length to someone else what I wanted to see but could just do it myself. As the Maxedia has a lot of cool plug-ins I could very quickly change and modify files to match the overall look or to sync it visually with the music. I could also use the efx engine to control video and layers in a different way – like strobing between layers.”

As far as useful features, Martin mentions, “Mainly the ability the plug-ins gave me to create ‘new content’ on the fly by altering stock content and make it look like something completely different. Control setup was easy – just enough DMX channels to control the essentials.”

Besides video, festival lighting included 24 Martin MAC 2000 Profiles, 8 MAC 250+, 4 MAC 300s, 4 Atomic 3000 strobes and 13 RoboColor Pro 400 along with other automated lighting, conventionals and more than 400m of LED-Strips.

Support = Success
Martin thanks Dean Price for teaching him the ins and outs of Maxedia in a few hours and for supplying him with content. “Dean provided a large amount of content, which proved to be very helpful to generate visuals on the fly,” he said. “It was so easy and enjoyable to take the basic AVI or Flash animations and alter and combine them that I ended up with more then I could use in the end – with just one day of literally playing around. The quality of the video output was stunning and unlike other systems I have used in the past, it never once crashed.”

Dean, who has successfully used Maxedia on a number of TV shows, was confident there would be no problems. “My involvement was talking Martin into using what was actually a beta version and giving him the support, content and my knowledge of Maxedia for a very successful show,” he stated.
Martin Kuhn is also grateful to Alex Doss, the main system designer for the video, and VJ for the event, who took care of the technical side of the video setup; as well as the other VJs from Lichtfront Cologne who provided content or played their own “sets”, alternating with the Maxedia. The Maxedia was supplied through Martin Germany with the rest of the trussing, lighting, video and sound from Satis & Fy GmbH.

Production Company: Satis & Fy GmbH
Lighting & Set Design, Visual Concept: Martin Kuhn
Project Manager: Jörn Busch / Satis & FY
Technical Supplier: Satis & FY GmbH Ascheberg
Operator: Martin Kuhn (Maxedia, lighting board, E:CUE, GLEC, Syncrolites)
Operator: Björn Herrmann: (lighting board, moving lights)
System Design, VJ: Alex Doss
Lichtfront: Jörg Thommes, Andre Gronewald, Stephan Müller
Maxedia content courtesy of Dean Price
Additional visual content by Amanda Holmes & Martin Kuhn