It is going to be the biggest Loveparade of all times: Artists like Moby, Paul van Dyk, Westbam and many others point out the global importance of the Loveparade. Last year, 1.2 million people attended the mega-event, culminating in a show on the main stage of the concluding demonstration. Here, Clemens Petzold, director of dotevent, is pulling the strings.
Clemens Petzold promises: “Both stage design and visual show will be spectacular“,. “In our minds and in computer simulations we set up and deconstructed everything countless times. This way we proved the feasibility of our ideas”, he explains. “3D-Models and exact storyboards now give everyone a clear picture of their job”.
”A project of this complexity makes most accurate planning a necessity if you want to stay in time and within the given budget“, Sebastian Kraas knows. For Stageco Deutschland GmbH, providing the stage system, he accounts for the setup. “A high level of technical expertise, experience and outstanding team leadership: Clemens Petzold unites all of these qualities like no other. For me he truly is the „head of show“.
Not only the stage setup is precision work: Clemens Petzold also keeps an eye on the lighting. The show on the main stage already starts at 5 p.m. – five hours until it’s dark enough to use conventional equipment for video projection“. Therefore, dotevent resorts to full-daylight LED video screens provided by Screen Visions GmbH from Stuttgart, Germany. These are movably integrated into the stage that extends to 19m in height.
„It´s our job to give the stage an interesting looks by day and by night. Thereby the illumination on the artists has to be balanced to the sunlight at all times for TV broadcast”, says lighting designer Heike Trebuth. „Color swaps and illumination moods need to be precisely coordinated. This will become an additional challenge”, Trebuth adds. “The DJs play seven hours live on stage and improvise continuously – so we have to be able to react at any time“.
Clemens Petzold, Sebastian Kraas and Heike Trebuth have been a well-rehearsed team for many years. For the Loveparade 2007 they developed a stage show that the masses were crazy about during the final party. On March 13, 2008, they were awarded with the „Opus – German Stage Prize” in the category Technical Realization.
