JDC2 IP helps Maktive bring MACROdose ‘mushroom’ stage to life at Coachella 2024

In recent months, turnkey production design studio and rental company Maktive has invested heavily in GLP’s new impression X5 IP platform – sensing both the potential for deployment in the arduous weather conditions of the outdoor season and that the common chipset will guarantee uniform, homogenous colour.

As a result, when it collaborated with fellow design company DoLaB to present its unique MACROdose dance music stage for the first time at this year’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, California, it were able to integrate large quantities of its recently acquired impression X5 IP Bar 1000s, X5 IP Maxx and much-coveted JDC2 IP to animate a series of ‘fabric mushroom’ sculptures which looked like they had just sprouted out of the desert grass.

DoLaB itself is a collective comprising brothers Dede, Jesse and Josh Flemming which builds bespoke architectural and art pieces. The installation itself consisted of nine oversized, satellite-shaped sculptures distributed across a field, under which festivalgoers could get some shade, rest and dance. Maktive delivered all the lighting and took care of the programming.

Maktive director Bryan McClanahan, who co-founded the partnership with Patrick Randall, explains that the two companies had collaborated on avantgarde art projects in the past: “For Coachella we were asked whether we could come up with a couple of different scenarios with different lighting configurations.

The goal was to keep as many lights hidden as possible, but obviously some fixtures needed to be unobstructed.” Those that they chose to reveal included FUSION by GLP Exo Beam 10 and JDC2 IPs. Meanwhile, up inside each of the mushroom type shapes were the X5 IP Bar and also the X5 IP Maxx – part of a burgeoning fleet of GLP new generation solutions in its rental inventory.

But it is the new JDC2 IP, offering more power and creativity than its predecessor, which has excited the company the most. Significantly, it offers the ability to create unique digital effects with an individually controllable pixel matrix. A powerful built-in dual-Cortex CPU with graphic processing offers over 100 GLP DigiFX, giving an eye-watering range of digital content.

“We first saw them at LDI,” says McClanahan. “For us it clicked right away the second we saw them in the booth.” He ordered 150 pieces in what the Maktive director describes as a blind purchase. “For us, this is our largest investment in a single type of fixture. We could see that the in-built 128-channel mode DigiFX were really a digital gobo that could be manipulated with X and Y coordinates like a moving head.”

“At Coachella they really got to shine.” As for the X5 IP Maxx and X5 IP Bars, they were placed inside each of the mushroom-type shapes. “The Bars themselves were mounted from the inside of a pole through the middle of the mushrooms, shooting outwards from the centre, and we mounted the X5 IP Maxx on the outer tips of the mushrooms shooting in. They did all the heavy lifting, illuminating the mushrooms with no uplighting – the mushrooms almost glowed from the inside out.”

It provided a perfect scenario for a star-studded line-up of artists, the DoLaB stage hosting performances from Chase & Status, Alesso, Anna Lunoe and DJ Tennis, plus back-to-back sets by Kaskade and Alison Wonderland and an impromptu party hosted by Billie Eilish.

“We were able to provide the lighting entirely from the GLP catalogue,” confirms the Maktive director in conclusion. “And the fact we were able to match the chipsets meant we got an even homogenous colour.”

Maktive’s Coachella production team comprised Bryan McClanahan (creative director); Jeury Duran (lighting director); Chris Hallet (project manager – day); Ernesto Melendrez (project manager – night); Kylie Woods (creative manager); Nicolai Anderson (lighting drafter); Shane Thompson (master electrician); and Nate Heiderer (video programmer).

Photo credit: Jamal Eid.