Wysiwyg Saves Time, $$ and the Environment, While Delivering for Wacken Heavy Metal Festival

ISSUE 26 /Sept 2009

wysiwyg saves time, $$ and the environment, while delivering for Wacken Heavy Metal Festival

Faster. Harder. Louder. That’s the anthem of the Wacken Open Air festival, a legendary tradition for heavy metal music fans held every August in Northern Germany. The 3-day event features over 80 bands from all over the world, including well-known bands such as Mötörhead, Saxon, D-A-D and Testament.

Shaded View stage layout for Wacken – not renders! Reuhl adds, “Thanks to the wysiwyg preprogramming studio, the operators had as much time as they needed to program their show to get the best results. Since there was no need for the operators and LDs to program on the actual stage during the nighttime, a lot of power and gas could be saved. Plus, the bands Approximately 70,000 people, comprised of artists, volunteers, and their LDs didn´t have to arrive a day earlier just to do their press, VIPs, security staff and of course thousands of frenzied programming at night. They arrived midday, programmed their fans, flock to the site to enjoy the live performances, partystage show in the studio and had it running three hours later on stage.” access, a medieval market, wrestling tent, ”Wackentube”, and other innovative treats for festival goers. Preprogramming was done with two GrandMA Full Size, 4 Dell 22” screens, 2 PCs with Intel i7 3 GHz 8 core processors, 12GB RAM, For the 20th Anniversary of W-O-A this summer, Michael Gieg- nVidia GeForce GTX 285, and two wysiwyg Perform Unlimited erich and Matthias Reuhl of bright! Preproductions GmbH in Ger- dongles. With this setup, the team was able to accurately simulate many were hired for preproduction of the stage and lighting for the 190 moving lights, 400 RGB LED channels, and approximately wide variety of acts. The team shared with us the many reasons 350 desk channels. they found wysiwyg so beneficial for an event of this scale.

Shaded View stage layout for Wacken – not renders! Giegerich explains, “We set up two preproduction suites in our mobile studio backstage. There we had two GrandMA Full Size Lighting Design was done by Jerry Appelt. Procon was the techni- consoles connected to two wysiwyg Perform Unlimited Systems. cal supplier for lighting, led by Technical Director Matthias Rau, We simulated the True Metal Stage as well as the Black Stage Account Manager Christian Unger, and front of house Sascha with all of their moving lights, LED bars and conventionals. We Matthes and Uli Weiss. ICS Festival Service GmbH hired bright! also simulated all of the audience lighting for both of the stages. preproductions directly. Most of the LDs or Operators used wysiwyg to program their complete shows and then only went to the stage for about 20 minutes to update their presets. This way it was possible to save a lot of power and reduce stress for the stage crew during band changeovers.”