Asteria Outdoors Festival 2025: Tales of the Crystal Realm hard dance music genre festival saw six international acts play to 7,500 people at Melbourne’s Burnley Park. Initially, the event was to be held under a tent, but a permit wasn’t granted, and it was completely outdoors. This meant a powerful, bright lighting rig that could withstand Melbourne’s unpredictable weather was required. The temperature hit 37°C, winds picked up to 50K, and there was also a small amount of rain.
On Track Lighting designed and supplied the lighting, utilising a fully ShowPRO rig designed for such an unpredictable day.
OTL’s most recent ShowPRO purchase was nine DiamondBack, which is the super bright RGBW pixel controllable beam with a zoom range of 3°-56° that looked incredible on the edge of the stage.
“Placed in a linear line on the front of the stage, the Diamondbacks created pixel traces across the front of the stage with the strobe bar,” Paul Nardella, Managing Director of OTL explained. “The idea was to create sheaths of light; unfortunately, the high winds meant it was almost impossible to hold haze on stage so that didn’t work out as we wanted, but that was the idea behind it.”
Providing much of the oomph to the rig were 48 x ShowPRO H1 Beam/Spot/Wash feature-rich yet lightweight fixtures that Paul adores. They were all rigged on a scaffold stage built by Clifton’s, which was 14 metres high by 20 metres wide. Each wore a little rain hat just in case.
“The idea was to get them up high just to create big gobo looks,” added Paul. “The higher you are, obviously, the more zoom angle you’ll get out of them. We had crazy big gobo looks, which looked amazing.”
The scaffold also housed 24 x ShowPRO Colliders FC Strobes that required no rain protection as they are IP65-rated. They worked hard as strobes and colour washes whilst also supplying dynamic effects and visuals.
“They are incredibly bright; they’re probably up in the top five of brightest strobes on the market,” said Paul. “They’re great because you can you can run CMY colour mixing through the H1s and then through the Colliders. During most of the daylight show, we ran everything through a Resolume media server, so you can pixel map the Colliders plus the Diamondbacks, you can run colour chases through the whole lot, including the H1s, and the VJ can control that. It’s a cool thing during the day because you know a lighting guy doesn’t really want to do much during the day, but whatever the video is doing, it automatically follows the colour content.”
The 18 x ShowPRO LED Blinder II performed brilliantly, with Paul noting that a lot of people like the classic look of the blinder and that these models emulate that without the hassle of the original models.
OTL also supplied 56 x ShowPRO Fusion PARs for site lighting around the perimeter of the festival, lighting up trees and various areas.
Paul received positive feedback after the event and is already working on larger-scale events.
“After Asteria was done, the lighting designer for another key festival hit me up and said he wanted the same rig!” he commented. “So a few days later, the rig went up there.”
