LEADERCAST LIVE 2018

MEPTIK is an Atlanta-based creative agency specialised in custom design for live events. Creative Director Sarah Linebaugh explains how she championed Notch in MEPTIK’s first conference stage design in real time.

The team were briefed to create a suite of stage looks and designs which would mark each speaker session. They would be designing content for a 27.43 m x 6.92 m LED wall with two LED wings on either side. “We wanted to take this very flat surface and bring three-dimensionality to it through the content.” Sarah’s design, influenced by the event branding, featured assembling paper shards: “We decided to create our content in line with this aesthetic and began to brainstorm how we could take the concept of paper shards and bring them to life on the set in a dynamic, three-dimensional way.”

Over the span of a few months, Sarah and Notch artist Joshua Eason experimented with ways to bring dimensionality to the otherwise 2D stage. “Our design process was a back and forth between Cinema 4D and Notch. We created the shards and animations in C4D and then the lighting and texturing in Notch. Josh figured out a way to put each animation on a slider in Notch, which allowed for easy control of the timing of the animations and the ability to interface with a lighting console.”

“One of the reasons we were excited to utilise Notch on this project was that we knew the client might require last-minute changes on site. Notch enabled us to accommodate these requests instantaneously. If we had treated the content more traditionally, our render times for content at this scale would have taken weeks. The content relies heavily on virtual lighting to create the shadows necessary for the shards to appear as three-dimensional objects on the set. Using Notch, we were able to work with the lighting designer on site to tweak in the lighting of the 3D shards to match the aesthetic with the rest of the set. This interactive collaboration with our lighting designer allowed us to create a much more cohesive environment in the room.”

The result was a set of stunning real-time stage visuals that created the illusion of three-dimensionality through the creation of cleverly deceptive content.