Robe Robins illuminate ILT in Ghent

3 January 2012

Belgium - Over 100 Robe Robin 600E Spot and LEDWash moving lights were used to illuminate the Blue Room, one of five arenas at the 2011 I Love Techno (ILT) event - one of the biggest and most successful rave experiences in Europe - staged at the Flanders Expo, Ghent, and attended by a sold out audience of 35,000 enthusiastic ravers.

The Robes were specified by the event's lighting video and production designer Thomas Boets of LD Productions, and supplied by rental company L&L Stage Services from Herentals, Belgium.

Boets designed visuals for all areas across the whole event - in which he has been involved for over seven years.

Seventy-six Robe Robin 600 Spots and 26 Robin 600 LEDWashes were used in the Blue Room, rigged onto to a series of trusses over the stage/DJ booth and on two box trusses - one inside the other - with curved edges that were flown above the audience. These two trusses had white fabric stretched between them, providing an ideal projection canvas for the Robin 600 Spots.

The LEDWash 600s were used to produce rich, bold and very bright colour mixes and techno looks all around the room, which featured a hi-energy molten mix of sounds from a line-up featuring Digitalism, Steve Aoki, Fake Blood, Cassius, Mumbai Science and others.

The lighting had to be dynamic and very flexible, offering enough options to keep going for 12 hours of non-stop partying and dancing to the very best of techno - and that's a challenge for any lighting rig, and also for operator Tom van den Burg, who used a Chamsys MQ 100 console to cut his own magic visual mix.

The pace was intense and relentless and utilised all the features that the Robin 600 Spots and LEDWashes had to offer - colour and shutter chases, zoom and iris shaping were just a few of the effects explored throughout the evening to the delight of performers, fans and Boets himself, who was very pleased with the results.

(Jim Evans)