Coldplay Music of the Spheres Tour 2022

For Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres stadium world tour, FRAY Studio used Notch to create IMAG looks, generative effects, and an interactive game.

Over the course of 5 months, FRAY Studio produced the real-time visuals for the Music of the Spheres World Tour, including video and generative effects and an interactive game for a pre-show warm-up.

Video effects played a vital role, with a brief to have IMAG continually displayed throughout the show. With the stage featuring 8 large LED screens, the team created a variety of looks using real-time generative effects that added moments of hyper-realistic stylised accents to the band following the narrative arc of the show.

Before each show, audience members could complete in a dance-off on two dance floors generating energy from movement. This in turn produced electricity for the show itself. Notch was used to visualise the energy generated and put video effects on the live feed of the audience dancing. The pre-show game screens would also display the current city, an activity meter, and an animated battery showing the generated energy. A video operator could then display the winner across the screens.

These accents of generative effects included the colourful prismatic trail effects of ‘Paradise’ and ‘A Sky Full of Stars’; the motion-generated particles of ‘Biutyful’; the gritty, audio-reactive video distortions of ‘People Of The Pride’; the psychedelic rainbow chaser colour effects of ‘Charlie Brown’; and the live recording capture and reverse playback of the band and audience of ‘The Scientist’.

“Notch allowed us to develop a real-time workflow, working in conjunction with Disguise to ensure we were able to produce and display video output over many different surfaces. Within single projects, we had as many as five different resolutions and multiple mapping types over different layers, taking into account the circular IMAG screens, Moonrise, which is situated in the up-stage of the band, and the LED spheres.“

Kira O’Brien, Creative Technologist, FRAY Studio

Additional press coverage:
Atlantic Records, Rolling Stone, NME, BMW Group.

Credits
Client: Coldplay
Creative Team
Creative Direction: Phil Harvey and Misty Buckley
Production Design: Misty Buckley
Lighting Design: Sooner Routhier
Video Designer: Leo Flint
Assistant Video Designer: Luke Davies
Special Effects and Laser Designer: David Kennedy with StrictlyFX
Video Director: Ant Barrett
Screens Director: Josh Koffman
Video Programmer: Dan Trenchard
Video Crew Chief: Phil Johnston
Video Engineer – Server Speciality: Owen Evans
Video Engineer – Vision Speciality: Piotr Klimcyzk

Video Engineer – Vision Speciality: Chris Farrants
Notch Design: FRAY Studio
Content Creation: FRAY Studio, NorthHouse, Luke Halls Studio, Impossible Brief
Head of Visual Content: Sam Seager

FRAY Team
Concept: Adam Young, Finn Ross, Laura Perrett, Letty Fox, Grace Arnott-Hayes.
Creative Lead: Henrique Ghersi
Notch Artists: Henrique Ghersi, Kira O’Brien, Norvydas Genys, & Jamie Kenny
Notch Artist for Dance Party LED content: Jamie Kenny
Unreal Engine Artist: Norvydas Genys