CHARLIE PUTH'S "SOMETHING NEW" WORLD TOUR 2024

In September 2024, Hidden Road Studios’ Rowan Glenn received a call to spearhead screen content for Charlie Puth’s Something New World Tour. The call came from Creative Director Molly Hawkins, with whom Hidden Road had collaborated on Harry Styles’ recent Love On tour, which proved to be one of the most renowned and highest-grossing tours of all time.

As Glenn remarks, “any time you get a call about an artist you genuinely listen to when you aren’t working, and then you get to work for those artists, it’s such a great pleasure.”

Identifying a lot of common ground between the music and aesthetics of Styles and Puth, the team took a lot of inspiration from the Love On tour’s blurring of the feminine and masculine with pastel colours, floral patterns, and a live translation of the vulnerability found in Puth’s meticulous songwriting.

As they approached the beginning of the tour, The Hidden Road team made one full visual sequence from scratch each day over the course of two weeks, sharing their completed works with Hawkins and incorporating feedback immediately, prioritising high-fidelity 3D scenes and minimalistic but beautifully refined video effects.

Describing the difference between Puth’s tour and those he’s worked on in the past for artists like Muse and J Balvin, the Notch designer notes, “I’ve found that what works for a lot of singer-songwriters is something that feels tangible, real, and authentic. You can’t just throw a glitch on them. It can’t be incredibly digital or obscurant. That doesn’t work. I think the true power of Notch I’ve found in the last three or four years is in being able to make camera effects more in this vein: lens distortions, light aberrations—things that feel like someone went to an old camera shop, found a lens, and put it on the live camera.”