Nature One festival called its dance-loving audience to the Pydna former rocket base in Hunsrück in August 2018 to see 350 acts participating on 23 floors. Lighting Designer Thomas Gerdon of GERDON design produced the entire visual concept for the largest floor within the festival, the Open Air Floor.
Gerdon, who has worked on various floors of Nature One since 2003, chose to use GLP’s new modular KNV LED system when it was decided that for the first time a conventional stage would be used on the Open Air Floor.
However, since the KNV system was not yet on the market at the beginning of August 2018, GLP instead met the designer’s request with a sufficient quantity of field test units. Thus, Nature One became the first German event in which this modular strobe, blinder, pixel fixture had been used in such large numbers.
Nearly 100 GLP KNVs for stage and centrepiece effects over the dancefloor and the most important and most striking design element was the KNV Cube. 32 fixtures, placed in blocks of two on top of each other, were installed on the stage, and their flexibility of control was the biggest added value for the Lighting Designer.
In every nightclub, there is lighting suspended over the dance floor, and this 2018’s Open Air Floor once again had a pyramid-shaped truss construction built around a new centre effect. This consisted of eight uniformly hanging, downwardly-tapered traversing circles, to each of which eight KNV Arc and eight moving lights were attached.
Apart from the extremely diverse design options, one feature of the KNV, in particular, caused quite a stir: its enormous brightness. “The brightness of the KNV modules really stands out. We often test new products that are advertised with very high light output, then ultimately do not look so impressive with the professional look. With the KNV this is really different. You turn it on and these hyper-bright power white LEDs are just evil and at first scare even a veteran like me,” chuckled Gerdon.
Thomas Gerdon and his team really enjoyed trialling the KNV under live conditions. “You cannot properly judge a device under test conditions in a hall. After a real field test, as we did with GLP at Nature One, there are no more questions to be asked. You know what the device can do and how to handle it. We installed the modules, turned them on and had fun. Although we did not have any production models available, there was no stress, thanks to its water resistance…not even in heavy rain,” explained Gerdon.