Illinois-based LEC Event Technology recently supplied 142 Claypaky Ultimo Sharpys for the Niteharts Festival, taking place outside San Diego’s Snapdragon Stadium.
LEC provided all the lighting, rigging and video elements for the festival stage and drafted/engineered its equipment solutions integrated with other production disciplines. The festival was designed by Bending Lite Productions’ Erik Mahowald and Daniel Ostroff with renderings and technical integration support from Joshua Gregoire and lighting programming by Aaron Attarzadeh, Jaycob Luque and Jake Hett.
The Niteharts Festival is presented and curated by local San Diego artists ISOxo and Knock2 and is a music festival blending high energy performances with immersive, larger than life stage design. In addition to the thrill of performances at nightfall, art elements and pop-up moments turned the stadium grounds into a canvas for guests to explore.
“The massive angled lighting trusses were the hardest production element to figure out on this show,” noted Nick Maty, LEC’s Managing Partner. “Each one was engineered to make sure we would not snap the Tyler Truss GT or 20.5 x 20.5 TMAX trusses. Some were picked with one motor and some were picked with two motors using custom swivel rigging points on the middle span motors. The second complicated element was the use of cranes to lift actual production elements, including a custom scenic logo piece covered with neon tape/lighting fixtures plus a 3D truss cube lined with lighting fixtures and covered in blow through Absen video tiles on the front. This project was easily the most complex of the year for me.”
LEC spent hundreds of hours in drafting, prep, and on site work with an entire team to problem solve, engineer and build the production. The team worked closely with Clark Reder Engineering and Entertainment Engineering Consultants to ensure that load in and load out would be seamless. Ultimo Sharpys were pre-rigged in the shop on Tyler Truss GT to eliminate the need to hang any moving lights on site.
“The Ultimo Sharpys were one of the centrepieces of the design for this event,” Maty reported. “We wanted an IP-rated beam fixture; the other 812 fixtures on the show were also IP-rated. We pride ourselves on zero gear failures so having a 100 percent IP rig that could stay outdoors for about a week with no worries was very important”.
Maty says that Ultimo Sharpys “had just been released when we got the initial concept for the show so we jumped on them immediately as we knew this would be a great test for them. The fixtures exceeded all expectations from our team and from all of the lighting designers on the show. The Ultimo Sharpys were close to the weight and size of the original Sharpys that we have been using for years and were very impressive. In fact, we plan on replacing our entire Sharpy fleet with Ultimo Sharpys in 2026.”
