Cameo ORON® H2 at the Open Beatz Festival

Laser beams in the middle of nature

Three days of EDM in the middle of nature – welcome to Open Beatz, the biggest open-air festival for electronic music in southern Germany. Every year, the 50-hectare site in Herzogenaurach, Bavaria, is transformed into an El Dorado for lovers of electronic beats, with a total of five stages covering all varieties of EDM. In 2024, 90,000 visitors were drawn to the five extraordinary open-air stages over three days, the three largest of which were equipped with lighting, sound, and video by Eventures GmbH. Tobias Reinartz from show design studio visualprime was responsible for the lighting design, working with the new Cameo ORON® H2 Hybrid Phosphor Laser Moving Heads for the first time.

Caldera, Stonelands, and Zone III – these are the names of the three stages at Open Beatz which Reinartz staged with great vigour and aplomb. As at the biggest international festivals, the Open Beatz stages have little in common with a classic stage, but present themselves as individually constructed themed structures (in this case realised by Stageventure) that offer lighting and video designers a great deal of creative freedom. Nevertheless, the motto of festival-experienced lighting designer Reinartz was: “Keep it simple”! “We have numerous guest lighting designers and lighting teams at Open Beatz who need to be able to quickly get to grips with a lighting set-up on-site. This aspect is often underestimated. It’s therefore important that not only I, but also all the other designers, can get the same quality out of the set-up quickly and efficiently.”

Perfect festival fixtures

The ORON® H2 IP65 Hybrid Phosphor Laser Moving Head, which Eventures sourced entirely from NicLen’s dry hire stock, was the central element of Reinartz’s lighting design this year. “The ORON® H2 is the brightest and most powerful beam moving head I’ve seen to date,” says Reinartz, impressed. “It offers everything you need for a festival like this: an excellent colour mixing system that doesn’t lose any of its assertiveness even with dark colours, plus fast movements, great gobos, and much more.”

“The ORON® H2 is the brightest and most powerful beam moving head I’ve seen to date.”
Tobias Reinartz, lighting designer (visualprime)

Even during the programming phase, it became clear that the ORON® H2 could fulfil the high demands. “The lights are always pushed to their limits during programming,” explains Reinartz. “Here we can already see whether a model fulfils the requirements or not. There was absolutely nothing to criticise about the ORON® H2.”

Light for social media

Reinartz used the ZENIT® W600 Outdoor LED Wash Lights to illuminate the stages and audience areas. Here, too, the lighting designer proves that there is much more to consider in 2024 than just what is happening on stage: “Our aim is to work with the audience as part of the lighting design and to offer the many social media teams on-site the opportunity to take great pictures and videos. That’s also important.”