PARKLIFE
PARKLIFE LUCID takes to Heaton Park to design The Valley stage, a brand-new festival space.
LUCID returned for a second year to design and build the newly iconic The Valley at Parklife Festival 2019. Four times the size of the previous year, the company used innovative engineering and design techniques to build the dystopian cityscape structure by building in a modular way so that the stages could be built quickly on site and can be reused year after year. This year’s line up on The Valley, hosted by Disclosure, included the likes of Nas, Kaytranada, Annie Mac, Denis Sulta, DJ Koze, Honey Dijon and Sally C. Helen Swan and Chris Carr, Co-Directors of LUCID, and their team have made a name for itself by creating and building structures that generate audience interaction and immersion by pushing the boundaries of set construction and its integrated tech. This year, the organisers of Parklife Festival asked LUCID to design and build them a new stage building on its work last year. The result was The Valley: a life-size tower block complex influenced by brutalist architecture and dystopian fiction, consisting of the 100m wide by 22m high stage, a 50m brutalist bar and a two-storey Pepsi factory doubling as a viewing platform. “Last year was our first time building this structure,” reflected Carr, onsite at the festival. “We’ve really expanded the concept this year into an all encompassing theme which is all part of our three to five year plan of how to expand The Valley.” Every window in the eight life-size tower blocks that make up the cityscape of the stage is an LED screen featuring moving silhouettes of the people living in the towers whilst the billboard screens continuously show futuristic
public service announcements and adverts. LUCID designed and created every inch of the set, from developing an eight-layer process to turn ply flats into hyper-realistic aged concrete, to making and programming the on-screen content and LED lighting. “I think one of our strengths at LUCID is our ability to cross over set design and the integration video and led technology. This year we have brought in Video Illusions who provided all our screens and dbnAudile who provided lighting.” The screens provided for the stage included INFiLED L10 for billboards, L 6 for the windows in the towers and ER4 for all screens on stage. Video Illusions also supplied an Avolites Ai server with five HD outputs needed to drive all the screens. “What we love about The Valley is the opportunity to extend the video canvas outwards from just the traditional upstage wall,” commented Video Illusions’ Oli Chilton. “This allowed acts like Disclosure to take full control of the windows to create their mesmerising Friday headline show. We hope to keep working with Chris, Helen and the rest of the LUCID team and provide their ever more ambitious projects with our unique approach to video production.” All three of the structures comprising The Valley had to be constructed onsite at the Parklife festival grounds within 10 days. This included leaving enough time for Disclosure to run through their programming with LUCID’s lighting design team. To ensure this was possible, LUCID developed a modular frame and bracket system that allowed them to get set up at height, with speed, and without crane lifts where none were available. 82
