Lighting Designer Andre Beekmans of The Art Of Light in collaboration with Andrei Predut of Apart Productions in Bucharest, Romania used a large complement of Claypaky fixtures to light the “We are ONE people” concert in the city’s National Arena to benefit humanitarian causes in the region.

The day-long concert on March 12 drew an estimated 50,000 people to the stadium and more watched the YouTube livestream and broadcasts on Romanian TV and radio.  Organized by SAGA Festival, PRO TV, KISS FM and the City Hall of Bucharest, the event featured local and international artists, including Armin van Buuren, Tom Odell, Jamala and INNA.  It raised more than 750,000 Euros for the Red Cross.

“Quick thinking and fast problem solving are a given at any time in this line of work, but for this particular project everything needed to be on steroids given the virtual no heads up regarding what would be happening,” says Predut of the concert’s fast organization and turnaround.  “As soon as we got the concert design plots we set out to find the best possible make and model fixtures for them.”

He notes that while LDs seek reliability and high quality in fixtures for any project, “on this occasion, given the fact that there was a huge cascade of acts broadcast on live television, the stakes were higher than ever.  As with any worthy cause, the odds were in our favor since the lighting provider, Bivolul, had a huge array of Claypaky products, which were a perfect fit for our needs.”

Predut deployed Claypaky Scenius Spots, A.leda B-EYE K10s and K20s, Sharpy Plus and Mythos fixtures for the concert.

“As expected, the build went flawlessly and after an outstanding effort of several hours from the technicians, we had the rig up and running,” Predut reports.  “Seeing all 116 active fixtures diligently executing all the commands sent from the grandMA3 console and the MagicQ MQ500M stadium console was a reward in itself; all that was left to do was to finish the final touchups.”

Everything went smoothly with no glitches throughout the event, he says.  “Thirty-five acts later, over a span of over nine-and–a-half hours the time finally came to hit ‘lamp off’ and power down the trusty installation that supported us in achieving our goal of raising funds for the Red Cross.”

Bogdan Gradisteanu of Marbo Trade in Bucharest is the Claypaky distributor in Romania.