Insomniac's Neon Garden stage under construction at EDC Vegas 2016. (Photo courtesy of Insomniac Events)
REPORTING FROM LAS VEGAS — Having spent 35 years in the concert business working with names like U2 and The Rolling Stones, Insomniac’s Lead Experience Architect Steve Howard has never seen anything nearly as complex at the Electric Daisy Carnival held here June 17-19.
“All those big tours that I have done that are fantastically complicated, and require so much prep and organization and everything are not nearly as complicated as a Pasquale Rotella-Forrest Hunt Electric Daisy Carnival,” Howard said. “There are so many moving parts to this festival and to what Insomniac does.”
Howard said that any one of the four biggest stages constructed for EDC is equivalent to any single stage used in arena tours. “With our eight stages, it’s like I’m organizing three stadium shows and four arena shows all at the same time,” Howard said.
The moving pieces do not stop there. “And that is before you get to live performers all over the site and art installations everywhere,” said Howard. “The live stream that we’re doing was a real challenge and quite daunting.”
As expansive as the vision of EDC is, Howard came in to find what he called an “organic being” in the team behind the scenes. Forrest Hunt, executive producer at Insomniac, has seen the challenges grow from the beginning. The answers he and the rest of the Insomniac team bring to the table have been largely self-taught.
After meeting Insomniac’s founder Pasquale Rotella in the 90s, Hunt said that he has seen the company’s office go from a dining room table to their current office in Beverly Hills, Calif.
The 20 years it has taken to get there have passed “super quick,” according to Hunt, from early days in which the stages were “tiny” to the over-300-foot stages at EDC’s 20th year anniversary event in Las Vegas. Hunt said today’s stages can hold 1,400 light and 5,000 LED tiles, depending on the design, which can be counted on to be called “impossible” every year when Rotella comes in to pitch new ideas.
The process is a collaboration through and through. Alyxander Bear, production director for Insomniac, said the design team, which consists of less then 10 people, will start with what “comes out of Pasquale’s head, and then we have to interpret it.”
Insomniac’s team works with a number of different individuals and design firms, located in Los Angeles and The Netherlands, to draw up what each stage will be. Each design team will do their best to match their respective stage to the music genre showcased on it. The process sees lots of back-and-forth interaction. “We will do a sketch, Pasquale will look at it and go, ‘No, no, it’s not there yet, guys,’” said Howard. Hunt added, the design process usually goes, “We don’t like this, we like this.”
The Neon Garden stage originally had wind chimes hanging inside of it, but Hunt made the decision to replace them with a 9-foot disco ball. Other changes will involve lighting fixtures and panels that might be used in Europe but are not available in the United States.
Bear said that while Hunt understands the light, color, and sound aspects of the festival, he covers a more “pragmatic side of the process. I’m the nuts-and-bolts guy, but I love building stuff.”
These practical elements of the event include looking at what has worked in the past and what can be made to work better. Designs have to include fluidity of movement, access for crowds, medical teams, and construction behind EDC’s Rainbow Road, Daisy Lane and Electric Avenue. Previous festivals saw some areas oversaturated, or areas where access only came from one angle and people would have to double back to reach other attractions.
Everything from the pathways to stages and concessions are engineered to follow restrictions laid out by fire and safety inspectors. Bear said he spent days going through every detail of the way everything at EDC is built. He shared that even though building inspectors are used to looking at structures made to last for 75-100 years, and the stages at EDC only stand for three days, many of the same rules still apply. This is where ingenuity and modifications come into play.
“We can’t come in here and lay foundations and in six months start building,” Bear said.
Strength is especially important in the severe winds sometimes brought on by the Las Vegas desert. The second night of EDC Las Vegas in 2013 saw winds strong enough that the event had to be shut down for safety concerns.
Bear said that every one of their structures is engineered to withstand 90 mph winds, even though the threshold for stopping the show is held at 40 mph winds.
“It’s not so much about how we build a stage and how the stage stands up, it’s all the stuff around here that flies around,” said Bear. “A trash can flying around can hit someone.”
Insomniac monitors weather conditions through National Weather Service feeds that staff will watch on their phones. With this predictive element in place, the team will also watch the wind through real-time anemometers mounted on top of every stage. Insomniac’s Ground Control team, which monitors the event and attendees at all times, will also look for lightning, which will prompt an evacuation if any is seen within 12 miles of the Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
“We don’t take anything at a guess,” Bear said of the extra precautions taken by Insomniac. He added that terrorism evacuation plans were drawn up this year. The plans came at an extra cost, said Bear, “but it was something we had to do.” Dogs are brought in to inspect the grounds before opening, and security is heightened at all of the entrance gates. “It’s a whole different world than it was just a few years ago,” said Bear.
With everything that goes into the construction of EDC, Bear appreciated the chance to share what goes into the process. From the rushed three-week construction process to 110-degree heat, “all the sweat and blood and everything else goes into it, then finally the culmination of this right here, that’s what we’re here for,” Bear said. “The sad part is in a few days we have to tear it down. It’s too bad we can’t build something that will be here for 50 years, or 100 years.”
Even standing at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway a day before the event occurred, Hunt said that they had already had meetings for EDC ‘17, as well as Nocturnal Wonderland, Escape, EDC Orlando and Insomniac’s Countdown event on New Year’s Eve. With the cycle of rebuilding not likely to end anytime soon, Bear showed no signs of losing the energy to keep producing, regardless of the timeframe.
“We come in here and figure out how we can make this thing big and badass and only be here a few days,” Bear said.
Interviewed for this story: Alyxander Bear, (323) 874-7020; Steve Howard, (323) 874-7020; Forrest Hunt, (323) 874-7020