Aairport Festival, Denmark

The Opportunity

Held in Aalborg in early 2020, Aairport Festival is Denmark’s first music festival dedicated exclusively to electronic dance music. During its inaugural weekend, Aairport Festival featured performances by some of Europe’s biggest EDM producers and DJs, including R3HAB, Salvatore Ganacci, Martin Jensen and others. On Saturday, the festival witnessed a full takeover of the stage by Holland’s EDM promotional giants Q-Dance and their super-team of DJs and visual artists. In order to deliver an immersive visual experience and enhance the festival’s all-night party atmosphere, Aairport organizers hired Sound & Light and its resident lighting designer Mikkel Stoklund Moltzen to provide an exciting and unique visual design for the festival’s debut.

The Solution

With the help of Danish lighting provider LiteNordic, Moltzen created a stunning display using Martin VDO Sceptron and Dotron LED video fixtures.

Moltzen’s design included 256 VDO Sceptron and 128 VDO Dotron fixtures suspended from four trusses floating over the audience area. The Martin VDO Sceptron and VDO Dotron are both compact and powerful LED video fixtures that can easily be mixed and matched for creative video and lighting applications. Both fixtures are driven by Martin’s P3 System Controller and backward-compatible with DMX for maximum versatility.

Moltzen used the VDO Sceptron and Dotron fixtures to create a hangar-like environment to match the festival’s airport-inspired theme. The fixtures were programmed using Martin’s innovative P3 System Controller to match the content on the main stage video screens and bring the artists’ visual content to life in a three-dimensional overhead display. Moltzen’s team also took advantage of the fixtures’ DMX programmability to create an eye-catching introduction that mimicked runway lighting for each new artist’s arrival on stage.

The Impact

“The venue had a very high ceiling, so my goal was to bring an intimate club vibe to the room with a ‘fake ceiling’ made of lighting fixtures,” said Mikkel Stoklund Moltzen, Lighting Designer, Sound & Light. “We chose Sceptron and Dotron fixtures because of how simple and easy they are to use, along with their ability to plug and play with the Martin P3 System Controller. The festival’s production team and I were extremely satisfied with the way the Sceptron and Dotron fixtures integrated with the main video screens and tied the room together.”

“The P3 System Controller’s flexibility and intuitive operation was essential to the success of my design,” said Moltzen. “When you have so many artists and visual content creators working together on one event, things can get complicated and mistakes can happen. That’s why it’s important to use gear that anyone can work with. The P3 System Controller enabled us to easily translate artists’ custom video content on the Sceptron and Dotron fixtures, and its pixel mapping abilities allowed us to hand system control over to the Q-Dance team and ensure their visuals would instantly translate to our rig.”

“We were also able to use its DMX integration to program a landing strip sequence that tied into the airport theme and made it feel like each artist was landing on the stage when their set began,” continued Moltzen. “Simply put, the P3 System Controller is one of the most powerful video control systems ever made.”