The Boomtown Fair Metropolis 2023

Metropolis Design LTD and LEDs Akimbo helped upgrade last year’s Zenith stage for the latest edition of the Boomtown Fair.

This past August, Metropolis Design LTD and LEDs Akimbo (along with the Happy Slap Boutique dancers) returned to the pillared Zenith stage in the high-tech Metropolis district of Boomtown for the 2023 edition of the Fair. The creative team used twenty-three light boxes featuring a video wall as a light source and ten giant crystal sculptures clad in over 30,000 RGB LEDs placed on top of two container ships as a centrepiece. 

The festival asked the team to use the stage’s tremendous pillars to guide their creative decisions with the goal of emphasising their size. The team used a combination of Notch, TouchDesigner, and Resolume. The primary visuals were a variety of shapes generated in TouchDesigner that moved up and down the confines of each pillar, pushed through a Notch Block to add particle and field systems and a general glitch effect that unified the varying material. On top of controlling things like colours and particle speeds in real time, Notch Designer and Video Producer Daniel Williams could also gradually add and remove individual particles, resulting in something more refined than a pre-rendered fade.

Williams found Notch’s Render Particles To Surfaces node particularly helpful when capturing 3D particle simulations and reprojecting them onto the surface of the actual sculptures. They also used the Render To Object Surface node to control the field systems flowing through the crystals. The creative team used Resolume as their media server, and the final results were well-received; already, they plan to build on their work for next year’s Fair.

“Everyone was really happy with what we managed to do in such a short time. Through it all, we could visualise our 3D model within a separate layer, editing simulations in one layer and viewing results in the other. We could also effortlessly send demos to the client, which was incredibly useful.”

Daniel Williams, Notch Designer & Video Producer, LEDs Akimbo

Additional press coverage:
Clash Magazine, Ratemyrave.

Credits
Client: Boomtown Fair
Production Company: Metropolis Design LTD
Production Design: Jody Schofield
Notch Designer: Daniel Williams (LEDs Akimbo)

Video Producers: Daniel Williams & Nick Diacre
Lighting Designer: Tom Sulat
Screen Producers: Video Illusions