This was a pretty big event!
Laser Spectacles fired on all laser cylinders at the stage known as “Neon Garden” in the Automobile Building, Fair Park, Dallas on June 18, 2011. We created a special laser stage, working with Onstage Systems from Dallas to create special low level lighting that showed the lasers to best effect. The promoters, Insomniac, expected it to be up to 20,000, almost twice as big as last year’s event at fair park.
The Automobile building is perfectly suited for lasers, being a long dark hall. Onstage split their giant LED video screens into 3 sections, two tall ones on each side, and one long one centered underneath the DJ booth on the stage. This left a large black area in the center which we filled with lasers, and hung a large mesh projection screen back behind the stage to project graphics and lumia onto.
It turned out to be a controversial event
Our experience was all positive. The crowd was quite mellow, and clearly there to see the music provided by an array of top notch performers on five different stages. Two of the stages were in our building, the Automobile Building; two were in another building across the lake, the Centennial Hall; and an outdoor stage that ended at 11 PM or so. The indoor stages were scheduled to go on until 2 AM.
I thought the crowd was great; whenever I walked outside, it was crowded, but mellow. there were great projections all over the place, people were playing in the huge fountains (not that they were allowed to!), and people walked around mindful of each other.
At midnight I decided to head over to the Centennial Building to see how the shows looked over there. Well, there were police at the door, and they would not let anyone in. I inquired, and was told that everyone was to leave the building. There was no reason given.
Back in our hall, the Automobile Building, the party was rocking! Unfortunately, possibly because the Centennial Building was closed down, it became overcrowded, and the fire marshal stepped in to reduce the crowd. Then, someone pulled the fire alarm; at that point the DJ, Skrillex, was told to stop and he did; they turned on the lights, and at 1:20 AM the show was over early.
What I did not know was that someone had died, and possibly another who was taken to the hospital. The mood did seem a little somber after the show while we were packing up, but I attributed it to the party ending early. No one was talking about any deaths.
I found out about that later on in the next few days. I read several articles that were written from hearsay, clearly by people who were not there, and tended to sensationalize the event by using phrases like “out of control”, or “mob”, or “riot”, which was just not the case. Besides one or two drug crazed people we ran into, everything seemed organized an under control.
I found one article online that seemed to make sense – here is a link to it:
http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/dc9/2011/06/on_saturdays_electric_daisy_ca.php
And finally, a quick and dirty video of the lasers in action at EDC Dallas 2011: