Soundstorm Festival 2024 - Big Beast Stage

Big Best Stage - Soundstorm Festival 2024. Photo by Chris Rustage

Soundstorm Festival 2024 held in Banban, about 40 minutes outside of Riyadh in Saudi Arabia is one of the largest music events in the world and LED Creative were proud to be back, this time providing a little wow for the main stage Big Beast!

You may or may not have heard about Soundstorm Festival, organised by MDL Beast but it is fast becoming one of the best festivals in the world, attracting world-famous headline acts as well as some of the best design and technical talent in the world.

This year Vita Motus designed the Big Beast stage and wow was it big. The gigantic LED Screen that frames the stage broke the Guinness World Record for the largest continuous LED screen. Sitting proudly in front of this much like the jewel in the crown was the punched aluminium header that was over 30m tall. The design team at Vita Motus, headed up by Heather Shaw, reached out to LED Creative to provide an LED product to populate this. It started as RGB Strip but the team at LC HQ are always up for a challenge and are keen to make every job as impressive as they possibly can. A week later the projects team had suggested a fully pixel mapped, high density LED solution that everyone in the SS24 design team loved.

Completing any project this size has obvious challenges, the first one being meetings at the construction Company in Dubai. This project was immediately proving to be truly international.

LED Creative developed several products to match the size, scale and requirements of this show. Sigma 96 was developed, offering an impressive 30% gain in brightness as well as a denser pixel pitch that would be vital in the design due to the size of the screen. Lots of testing including trips to PRG UK confirmed that Sigma 96 was up to the task.

LED Creative’s Gigabyte Drivers were also developed to cope with the new Sigma 96 product. as well as a server system to handle the mapping and control of the whole system. All these systems had to be expanded to cope with the scale. 8K video input on the servers insured versatility at all points.

The Header design called for a whopping 2700m of LED on the header alone as well as B stage and other elements.

To put that into numbers,

·       Pixel by Pixel Control would be 3236 Universes. Grouping of pixels meant final count was 809 Universes.

·       More than 250 LC Gigabyte Drivers.

·       Over 2700m of Sigma 96 LED

·       Over 24,000m of feed cable from drivers to LED (Max feed length of 40m)

·       LED’s were running a minimum refresh rate of 60fps over a 1gb Network.

·       ‘Dithering’ setting used on Gigabyte drivers to further smooth out the refresh rate.

·       Gamma Correction used on drivers for true colour output.

·       LED Servers running software from Light Jams received 4K video feeds for content as well as sACN from lighting to complete the versatile control package.  

Speaking with Heather Shaw, Founder of Vita Motus Design Studio she said "Working with LED Creative on Big Beast was such a win. Their LED tape brought the design to life in ways we never could have anticipated, and the end result blew us away.” When asked what made them choose LED Creative for this project, she went on to say “This was the most LED we’ve ever incorporated into a project, so we needed someone we could trust to manage and deliver, and LED Creative absolutely stepped up to the plate. We’re so glad they were the ones on this journey with us."

LED Creative’s Senior Project Manager Tim Rees said, “Soundstorm is one of the most impressive festivals in the world for sure - we have been involved in previous years, but it was a real honour to be asked to work on the main stage. This project was a massive undertaking in so many ways, not least the scale of the design presented to us. In true LC fashion we wanted to provide the best system of this type anyone had ever used; it turned out this was the ethos of every team working at SS24 so we fitted in well. Every team we interacted with were a pleasure to work with. Our team on the ground did a spectacular job, huge thanks to them. This will be a job that sticks in my memory for a long time to come.”

Credits:

Design by Vita Motus Design Studio

Lighting Supplier – PRG

Video Supplier – PRG

Power by Aggreko

Big Beast LD – Alex Reardon

Scenic Construction – Projex UAE