Coachella

As far as festivals go, Coachella is easily one of the biggest and most well known.

In 2017 I helped produce content for one of Coachella’s biggest parties hosted by Republic Records and sbe.

In conjunction with Intel, we helped to produce audio-visual content for the Republic Records x sbe Hyde Away party featuring the New York-based electro-rock duo Phantogram. During Phantogram’s set a complex system was used to mimic the duo’s often trippy, dreamlike music videos in a live-setting.

It took a surprisingly large team to make Phantogram's set happen. Photograph: supplied

Because it’s one thing to create Phantogram’s mind-bending, abstract style in a studio - cit's another thing entirely to recreate it live and in 3D.

Alongside an international team of developers, we used the well-known multi-platform game engine Unity to capture and analyse Phantogram’s live tunes. The resulting data was then fed through to the in-house VJs who fed it through further programs before being streamed as visual projections onto massive 180° screens live during Phantogram’s set. The whole setup was so massive and involved that it required computers with 256GB of RAM (the average laptop has 4-8GB) and a backup computer as a fail safe measure.

If all that sounds a bit complicated to you, basically what we helped do is turn music and video footage into visual projections in real-time. And the end result looks something like this:

Key to the surreal projections was the use of the Intel RealSense R200 Camera, which allowed the audience to become part of Phantogram’s set. Using its depth-sensing capabilities, the camera live-captured the crowd and created stylised images of them which (using the above method) were projected to the audience on the huge screens.

So no - the we weren’t exactly partying down with guests such as Giorgio Moroder and Kungs. But their work did help make the Phantogram set at the Republic Records x sbe Hyde Away party at Coachella into a ultra-trippy, tech-enhanced spectacular.