We were tasked with conceptualising and creating the video content for Billie Eilish's 2019 Coachella performance and the When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? sold-out world tour.
Each song's visual content was tailored to its meaning, emotion and atmosphere. The show designer briefed us that the show should feel like a journey through a dream world, with nightmarish imagery taking a prominent role.
We embraced this and set about creating visual treatments for the songs alongside Billie's existing visual language: the creature under the bed for Bury a Friend, the spiders for You Should See Me in a Crown, the burning dolls for Watch.
Alongside the song content, production designers Erik Anderson and Nick Whitehouse at Cour Design wanted a set of live-camera looks: dark and twisted, strong enough to work as stage lighting in their own right, with Billie the focal point of every frame.
A Notch look was prototyped per song and reviewed early, so treatments changed on the spot rather than after a render. Live camera ran through Notch so IMAG and rendered video sat inside one lighting-led look: the water treatment takes the camera feed as an image plane and displaces it with bump maps derived from real water, with fractal noise, film grading and a turbulence warp on top.
Everything was programmed onto a Disguise gx2 at rehearsals in Los Angeles and operated live on the tour.
“Rapid prototyping was pretty essential in this project. Notch’s speed and reactivity make the integration with lighting easy.”Comix, in Notch’s case study
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"These are brilliant miniature American horror stories, the likes of which only Eilish is even attempting.", The Guardian
"Billie's energetic performance was highlighted by some of the most elaborate audio-visual presentations and staging of the 2019 Coachella to date.", Daily Mail
For Ocean Eyes and Watch & Burn we created live camera effects using Notch. It's a great tool to help breathe style into live camera looks during moments where the focus is entirely on Billie or any special guests such as Vince Staples during the Coachella performance.
For the intro to Billie's show, she wanted the visuals to introduce the various elements of the upcoming show in a handmade aesthetic. We created a series of scenes where the character of Billie has nightmarish visions invade her dream, then Finneas scored the track adding particularly creepy tones to the already dark animation.
"Billie's energetic performance was highlighted by some of the most elaborate audio-visual presentations and staging of the 2019 Coachella to date.", Daily Mail
