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Elation and Apart power Untold Festival’s 10th anniversary main stage

Elation lighting fixtures took center stage at the 10th anniversary of the Untold Festival, one of Europe’s largest music festivals, held August 7-10, 2025, in Cluj-Napoca in the Transylvania region of Romania. With more than 470,000 attendees and a lineup featuring Post Malone, Armin van Buuren, Martin Garrix, Tiesto, Becky Hill and more, the milestone edition was celebrated with a production that blended folklore-inspired staging with lighting.

For the first time, Apart Productions, led by Andrei Predut, took charge of Untold’s main stage lighting after several years of working on the festival’s secondary stages. As part of the team, Florina Dascal served as the overall Art Director, Bobo Nedelcu from Apart Vision was the Head VJ and Video Designer, and Alex Mihut, Head of the Sound Department at Apart Sound, led the audio direction.

Predut and his team, working in partnership with gear provider Bivolu and Elation’s Romanian distributor Zeedo, turned to Elation’s SOL I Blinders, Proteus Hybrid, and Proteus Hybrid Max fixtures to bring the ornamented stage to life. The Untold main stage is a massive, multidisciplinary undertaking, with artistic direction, structural engineering, and technical design all working in unison. For the festival’s 10th anniversary, the stakes were higher than ever, with a strong emphasis placed on the stage’s unique decorative frame - a defining element that set the visual identity of this year’s celebration.

The main stage design, inspired by Romanian fairytales and folklore, featured an elaborate dragon motif that was dramatically brought to life using 130 SOL I Blinders deployed not as traditional blinders but as eye candy and texture enhancers to accentuate the dragon décor. Arranged in a crisscross design to mimic dragon scales, the SOL fixtures highlighted the ornate décor using gradients and dynamic color shifts that brought depth and motion to the scenery.

“We needed the dragon to come alive rather than just lay down a large brush of color, which would have been a bit boring”, says Predut, who supervised the main stage lighting team. “That’s why we used lots of smaller sources, so we could create gradients and patterns that followed the contours of the décor.” While guest LDs managed artist lighting, Apart maintained control of the décor frame to ensure the look reflected Untold’s signature visual identity. Forty-eight Proteus Hybrid fixtures formed a crown of beams that filled the stadium, creating what Predut describes as “a dome or coliseum of light” effect. Ten Proteus Hybrid Max fixtures, mounted in hard-to-access positions beneath the stage, delivered gobo textures.

While Elation’s presence in the Romanian rental market has been limited, Untold marked an important moment for the brand in the country. With Zeedo’s support, Apart Productions sourced additional units through Motion to meet the scale of the production. “The market is shifting, and local rental companies are discovering other brands like Elation”, says Predut. “For big outdoor festivals, I look at Elation fixtures.”

(Photos: Elation/Pixium.Photo)

www.elationlighting.com

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