Coalesce NYE

Roles: Production Designer, Technical Director, Touchdesigner Programmer, Lead VJ, Projectionist

An unforgettable NYE Event in a beautiful venue on the Bay in Richmond California. Coalesce brought together some of the worlds absolute best talent both for Music and Visual Arts. The Weekend orbited around a beautiful stage designed by Carey Thompson. Lighting designed by Jason Magellan lit the rest of the space the way for roaming performers from Pyroglyphics and MASC Studio to entertain people in every nook of the beautiful building. To balance out the energy emitting from the stage a massive Bronze Mars 1 Molecule sat opposite of the stage near the back grounding the experience between these two focal points. Some of the brightest talent in painting today lined the walls and led the experience to the dance floor where patrons were invited to bath in finely tuned Funktion one audio with none other than Ron Lorman at the helm and the amazing folks at One-Source Productions. There, people could gaze up at the incredible world class visuals displayed on the 42 foot stage piece.

As Production Designer I collaborated with the event Producers at Cosmic Synergy to curate the lineup pairings and scheduling, worked with the lighting crew to assure the best possible looks for the event, developed the 3D models, mapping templates, and final signal flows for the visual art team to start creating content for the event. I took on the job with one month before the event and had finalized assets to the animators and VJs quickly after. Martin from DoubleYou also provided a lot of help getting the models finalized for all platforms as well as lent free use of his render farms for us to use. I also worked with the fire performers, aerialists, and roaming performers to help schedule the best times for their acts, and also worked with some of them to develop custom costuming for their headdresses using the same design as the Carey Thompson Stage. An NYE countdown was curated by me using art from the facebook community “tipper art” using art from community members some of whom would be in attendance.

As Technical director I developed signal flow diagrams and coordinated with the event producers what lighting and video equipment we would need. From there I developed the derivative of Luminosity in Touchdesigner that I would be using to run the mixing, layer routing, and effects of the show. The final mapping was done using Madmapper to ensure output at all times in case touchdesigner crashed, which it never did fortunately.

Upon arrival onsite for the first day of mapping, it became apparent the producers had not hired a projectionist either. I took this on my plate as well and after a hellish load in with no stagehands and lots of broken components from the equipment supplier I had the show up and running. I couldn’t have done it without the immense help of the Rigger Loren, as well as Jason Magellan, and Randell Lamontagne.

The mapping was completed just in time as the sun came up on Saturday and we started the event! A real Nail-biter

Visual artists included: Andy Thomas, Steven Haman, Fractaled Visions, Datagrama, Delta Process, TAS, Pickles Visuals, DoubleYou, and myself. Several of these artists have teams of incredible artists and animators behind them as well. I would love to name all the contributors and will try but I may miss some people.

VISUAL ARTISTS
Andy Thomas

Steven Haman - Steven Sources art from willing incredible artists around the world.

Fractaled Visions - Keith works with his own animations and animators across the world to curate incredible visuals sets.

Datagrama - Datagrama consists of João Beira who leads things as well as Theron Pray from Synesthesia.Live

Delta Process - Delta Process is made up of Fede Petrei and Fay Fernandes

TAS - Tas is one amazing guy! It was an honor to work with him.

Pickles Visuals - Pickles is an excellent VJ that works with content from content creators around the world.

DoubleYou - DoubleYou is led by Martin Stebbing and supported by Drocles Drogly, Martin Evigglad and Ricardo Martinez

b1n4ry - b1n4ry is all content curated from a few friends but mostly created myself. I’ve been experimenting with additional contributors and Megan Matthews made some amazing content for Coalesce.