All-Weather Elation Lighting for Alabama's Hangout Music Festival

	Hangout Music Festival's Beach Stage

Alabama's southern Gulf Coast was the scene of the Hangout Music Festival held May 18 - 20, where artists such as The Chainsmokers, Zedd, Halsy, ODESZA, Pussy Riot, and others performed beneath a Bandit Lites-supplied lighting package that included all-weather Elation Professional IP65-rated lighting.

Nearly 40,000 music fans gathered in Gulf Shores for Hangout 2018, an annual 3-day music festival that Bandit Lites of Nashville has provided lighting for since 2014. Both the Surf Stage and Beach Stage featured weatherproof Elation lighting with a headlining performance by The Chainsmokers on the Hangout Stage also dressed in Elation gear.

Bandit Lites' Dizzy Gosnell designed the festival lighting packages for the Hangout Stage, Surf Stage, and Beach Stage, working with headline acts to provide a system that could work for their night performances while giving bands earlier in the day enough punch to support their shows. Some headline acts brought additional lighting packages or scenic and set pieces with them.

On the Surf Stage, Gosnell created a fittingly wavy, three-truss rig that mimicked the rolling waves of the nearby surf. To emphasize the shape of the system both day and night, he outlined the truss with 26 Elation SixBar 1000 IP color-changing LED battens along with 13 LED-based Cuepix Blinder WW2 white light blinders, all aimed at the crowd and used as audience lighting.

On the Beach Stage, an all-Elation lighting package consisting of 45 SixPar 100 IP LED Par lights, eight SixPar 100 LED Pars, eight SixBar 1000 IP LED battens, and 14 IP65-rated Paladin blinder/strobe/wash lights worked from six 8'-tall ladder trusses. Although the Beach Stage is an open design with little protection from the elements, Gosnell reports that the IP-rated lighting worked extremely well.

In addition to the three stages, Bandit also supplied packages for some of the artists, including Logic and The Chainsmokers. On The Chainsmokers' set, Elation Paladin hybrids were mounted onto four truss towers, two either side of the rear riser, with all the heads pointed downstage. The hybrid fixtures were used as blinders, strobes, and eye candy, and also served as safety lighting in the event of an evacuation (Bandit furnished each stage with enough static audience lighting so the crowd could see safely in case of extreme weather). The Paladins were mounted inside Bandit's GoGo truss with wheels on the back so they could be deployed and struck quickly during changeovers.

Now in its ninth year, the Hangout Music Festival has clearly found a formula that works with an eclectic lineup of artists and a reliable and creative lighting partner in Bandit Lites. "Hangout is the official start of festival season for us and always a blast to be involved with. There truly is not a festival like it," Gosnell concludes. "The gear all performed exactly as spec'd and handled the one storm we got on the Thursday night admirably."