Beyond the Valley Main Stage Design

The promoters Untitled Group asked Production Designer Andy Mutton to produce a lighting stage design for their popular music event the Beyond the Valley Music Festival's main stage.

The inspiration for this stage comes from Andy's first design lessons of using vanishing points in high school some 30 years ago. Mutton wanted to give this stage a perception; beholding the onlooker to a normal 2D perception but physically delivering a 3D stage before them. The lighting stage design aims to border, but not conflict with the different styles of music being produced by the Artists over the three days of the festival.

The Lighting Designs texture consisted of 500 pieces of 401 graded Stainless Steel, 600 meters of Flexible LED Strip. The backbone required of 1800 meters of pine, screws, L-Channels, scaffold clamps, core flute. Many of the materials are sourced from previous designs and the designs are built to be used again .

The LED strips on the front of the set were design by Mutton and built by LED Strip Solutions in Melbourne. The flexible LED strips were placed in 80mm channels that had wings of white Maxi T material either side of the tube. This was configured to capture more of the light that is produced by the LED flexible tube. The channel also helps to keep other light sources off the tube, so that the LED tubes appear sharper to the eye and mostly to the camera. The design was supported by scaffold.

The stainless steel was cut with the direction of the hairline grain in the steel made to always be running through the centre of each piece. This caused the light flare and reflections to warp linearly towards the stage, visually bringing more focus to the centre stage performances.

The LED tube was driven by 20160 DMX RGB channels and plotted in a MBOX video media server to drive colour and patterns across the pixel map. 16 Robe BFMLs Moving spots and 6 x 12W Lasers were use to project onto the stainless steel and surrounding material.