Robe is Center Stage at EXIT Festival

The EXIT festival, staged at the Petrovardin Fortress in Novi Sad on the banks of the River Danube in Serbia, this year saw more than 100 Robe moving lights used extensively to light two of the largest stages.

The line up of international artists included Jamiroquai, Nick Cave, Pulp, James Zabiela, Fedde le Grand, Underworld, Marco Cariola, Beirut, Laibach, and many more who were enjoyed by over 100,000 people over four days, with the Festival welcoming its two-millionth visitor over the weekend. Some performances were also broadcast live on national television, adding an extra pressure to the production lighting and visuals teams.

Lighting, audio and scenic LED screen for EXIT 2011 was supplied by locally based Studio Berar. This was the first time on EXIT that the company had used its new Robe ROBIN 300 Beams, 12 of which were deployed in the Dance Arena, along with 20 ColorSpot 700E ATs.

Seventy Robe ColorWash 575E AT Zooms were used as the workhorse fixtures on the Main Stage, hung on overhead trusses and giving the designers many creative options to keep the different performances looking fresh and varied.

Goran Kravic, Marko Maleševic, Radoslav Mihalek, and Milos Ekic were the lighting designers assigned by Studio Berar to the project. Collectively, they produced fabulous production designs for the three largest stages (two of which featured the Robe fixtures), and also operated the rigs using a selection of Avolites consoles. Meanwhile, Momcilo Berar and Emil Berar project-managed and coordinated the complete technical realization for the event, for Studio Berar.

The design team commented that lighting four days of continuous performances and keeping the look and feel of all the different performances varied, interesting and visually stimulating would have been impossible without using the Robe fixtures. "The Robes are dynamic, high-impact effects," they say, apart from which, time and again they have proved totally reliable and "Never let us down."

They particularly like the high speed of the pan and tilt movement and the intense brightness of the fixtures, which is easily up to competing with the large amount of scenic LED screens that were on the stages.

They were all particularly impressed with the brightness of the ROBIN 300 Beam for its expedient size. It was the second time that these had been out on a large scale event following Studio Berar's lighting of a performance by the band Apocalyptica a couple of weeks earlier in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

On the Dance Stage at EXIT, six ROBIN 300 Beams were on the floor behind the DJ and six in the air.

The Studio Berar designers also commented that the Robes are ideal fixtures for festivals, because they are so resilient to the extreme environmental conditions that commonly occur like rain and dust.