Boygenius at Coachella 2023

TAWBOX and Pixels & Noise worked together to translate Boygenius’s intimate indie folk and rock instincts to their widescreen Coachella stage.

In a landmark year for indie supergroup Boygenius, TAWBOX and Pixels & Noise joined forces to create visuals for their Coachella set. They planned to augment the stage design with a virtual set extending into the LED, using screen content almost as a stage prop that would react to the practical lighting. It was about subtraction as much as addition, with the visuals going black and creating the illusion of an endless stage in many moments.

With tactful restraint as their compass, the creative team used the full canvas for carefully crafted effects only when necessary, knowing the audience would be especially sensitive to each sequence’s impact. As it was all outdoors, they needed to create a set of live controls to ensure the visuals maintained the highest quality in lighting conditions far different from those in which they rehearsed.

The Pixels & Noise team incorporated proxy Notch Block modules within their disguise timeline to outsource the effects of Notch’s Virtual Background feature to a custom set of racked PCs, which provided them with a smooth workflow while delegating responsibilities away from the main show machine and freed up much-needed resources for other tasks, such as managing virtual light rigs on the virtual stage props.