Duration: May - August 2020
Role: Director, Lead Artist, Lead Tech Artist
Tools: Unity (built-in renderer), Houdini
Highlights
First interactive live stream on Tik Tok (fans can vote for effects in the show and see their text appear in game)
I did art direction, visual design, C# scripting, interaction design and vfx/lighting/camera work
4 songs, 1 interactive 30 minute pre-show, and outro animation sequence
2 avatars, The Weeknd and Doja Cat
Directed mocap sessions
About
This was a live & interactive broadcast of The Weeknd’s virtual concert on Tik Tok that happened on August 7th 2020.
The original timeline of this show began in April, however I came on to this project in late May to help reimagine what this show could look like as a more visually psychedelic and maximalist production. Part of a small but amazing team at Wave and Strangeloop Studios, we quickly designed and created a teaser trailer to show this reimagined vision, which got instantly green-lit by the team at XO.
Soon after, I was tasked with turning our minute long trailer into a 30 minute long virtual concert spanning 4 songs, 2 interactive interludes, and an outro ending sequence, not to mention an interactive pre-show segment that could keep potentially millions of stream viewers on TikTok occupied before the show began.
The path to completing this in our short time frame of two months was very difficult, but we did it. I led a small but talented crew of artists, including some animation support from studio Future House, and some concept support from Strangeloop Studios on a very tight schedule. We all had to overcome numerous technical (this was the first interactive broadcast ever on TikTok), creative and emotional challenges along the way, but we shipped it in the end, and had a very successful live broadcast with millions of attendees. 2 months of hyper focused creative output and technical problem solving for 30 minutes of live content, but it was worth it.
The show takes you on a wild and psychedelic ride through diverse dream states, starting in dystopian city ruins and ending in an explosive cosmic trip. The story elements we arrived at came about in an organic way, revealing themselves as we experimented with ideas for striking visual imagery such as veins taking over a city left in rubble, dream-like vignettes tuning in and out of existence like channels on a TV, or a nightmarish decapitated head chasing after the Weeknd in a tunnel chase scene.
Users could affect the show through text they would type in the chat, from voting on whether to engulf the world in flames or electricity, to seeing their names appear on signage and fireworks throughout the show.
In addition to directing, I created a lot of the visual effects, lighting, camera movements, and also handled the majority of tech art related tasks and problem solving.
Unfortunately the whole recording of the show is publicly unavailable, but some additional screenshots and video captures are below.
Visual showcase: Veins
The first song in the show was Pray for Me, though it was a later addition to the set, so I didn’t have much time to figure out the creative for the song. However, this ended up becoming one of my favorites. I was kicking around ideas one day when Stu Campbell (one of the artists who worked on this show from the initial re-imaging to the end) created some great vein like structures, which gave me the idea of turning the destroyed city into a giant life-like organism, pumping blood through its veins while they took over the decaying buildings. Messages that people wrote through the chat in TikTok got converted to text throughout the transforming city. I ended up working with Sutu, taking different vein components he modeled and arranging them around the city, writing a shader to make them dissolve in from a central point and pulse light along their pathways.
Visual showcase: Channel Switching
This was an aesthetic I developed during the re-imaging phase of the project and that I ended up using in the final production of the show. Using some custom shaders, the idea was to make it appear like you’re switching channels on an old analog TV, like the fast movement of an electron beam scanning the screen.
Screenshots
