THROW DISTANCE — 24 M · KEYSTONE CORRECTED
The wall is up.
The beam is yours. Live show visuals: how concert visuals are built, from projection mapping to the LED wall
Concert visuals are their own trade — images warped onto surfaces that will not hold still, LED arrays stacked until a flat wall resolves into depth, cues programmed frame by frame against a set list. This is a working reference to how live concert visuals are designed and run, and a record of the productions that defined the form.
A show is never one discipline. The same surface has to be modelled, mapped, rigged, previsualised, run live and lit — and the six trades below argue with each other, constantly, about who owns which frame.
The craft behind live show visuals: projection mapping to the LED wall
six disciplines, one rigEvery element of a touring picture is somebody's specialism, and the boundaries between them are where shows go wrong. The projection mapping designer needs the scenic build frozen before content can be authored to it. The LED wall vendor needs the pixel pitch signed off before the content team knows what resolution they are drawing for. The lighting designer and the video department are both trying to own the same cue, at the same moment, in the same air.
What follows is one page per discipline: what it actually involves, what it costs when it is done late, and where it hands over to the next trade.
Two more pages sit alongside the six rather than inside them. Art direction is the role above the trades, six technical departments can each do their job perfectly and still produce a show that looks like nothing in particular, and this is the seat that stops it. Content creation is the slowest thing in the room and the first thing anybody notices, and the only element authored against a canvas that is rarely rectangular and often does not physically exist yet.
- CH 01 Projection Mapping Warping an image onto a surface that is not flat, and will not hold still.
- CH 02 LED & Volumetric Pixel pitch, moire, and building real depth out of a flat LED wall.
- CH 03 Stage Architecture The set is a structure before it is a screen. Load paths, truss spans, span limits.
- CH 04 Previs & 3D Building the show in a computer, before the truss ever goes up.
- CH 05 VJ Workflow Clip banks, tempo lock, and cutting live to a set you have never heard this way.
- CH 06 Light Programming Fixtures, palettes, timecode, and where the lighting desk stops.
Stage & scenic design, in full → Real-time & VJ craft, in full →
The productions that defined concert visuals
documented, with sources
A handful of productions between 2013 and 2017 did more to set the current shape of concert visuals than a decade of incremental touring did. They are worth documenting not as spectacle but as engineering: each one solved a specific problem, and the solution is still in use.
The period was unusually concentrated. Affordable real-time rendering, fine-pitch LED and mature mapping software all arrived within a few years of each other, and a small number of productions explored the resulting space very quickly, often by building something once, seeing whether it read from the back of the room, and then rebuilding it to survive a routing.
Two threads run through the whole set. The first is depth: the repeated finding that separating a picture physically beats making it sharper, which appears first in the stacked-plane designs and returns years later as volumetric LED. The second is packing: a surprising share of what reads as aesthetic choice turns out, on inspection, to be a decision about what fits in a truck and assembles the same way every night.
Each entry records what the production was, the technical problem it set out to answer, and which discipline carried the weight, with the craft page one click away. They are built from published sources, and where the record is thin the page says so rather than filling the gap.
- 01 Layer3 a performance sculpture in three planes 2014
- 02 You're Dead! Release a release night built as one event 2014
- 03 Hypercube mapping a cube that will not hold still 2015
- 04 Coachella Light Shows the desert field as a canvas 2015-16
- 05 Sydney Opera House a listed building as a projection surface 2016
- 06 Hollywood Bowl the shell, and what it does to a beam 2016
- 07 Prophecy Tour a live performance installation piece 2017
- 08 Pardon My French an LED array resolving true volume 2017
- 09 The Weeknd Tours three years of a touring visual language 2015-17
The toolchain the picture is built in, from media server to VJ rig
what is actually runningNone of this is drawn by hand at showtime. A VJ running a festival set, a media server holding a timecoded arena show, and a designer previsualising a stage that does not exist yet are all working in a small, stable set of programs.
The toolchain divides along a line that is easy to miss: some of these are instruments and some are construction kits. An instrument has strong opinions about what a show is, and in exchange it can be played under pressure without looking. A construction kit assumes almost nothing, which makes it capable of anything and considerably more work. Knowing which one owns which job is most of the craft.
The softwarefive programs, one show machine
- Live playback Resolume The clip-and-layer instrument behind most VJ sets. →
- Real-time render Notch Content computed while the show is happening. →
- Systems & control TouchDesigner Not a player. The thing that makes the rig behave. →
- Mapping & alignment MadMapper Dedicated warping for surfaces that are not flat. →
- Custom software Cinder When the requirement is novel enough to be written. →
The calculatorsworking tools: they run in the page
From Pink Floyd to Flying Lotus, examining the past, present and future of live performance visuals.
The rest of the reference
vocabulary, sources, shorter notesThe four sections above carry the argument about live show visuals. These three carry the apparatus behind it: the vocabulary the pages use, the published record they are built from, and the shorter notes that do not fit a discipline. Together they are what makes the account of how live concert visuals are designed and run checkable rather than merely readable.
- THE VOCABULARY Glossary Every term on this site, defined once, from throw ratio and moire to timecode and pre-viz. Read→
- THE SOURCES The Field in Print What the trade press, the vendors and the designers themselves have published about this work. Read→
- THE NOTES Journal Shorter pieces on single problems, a lens choice, a cue, a rig that only worked the second time. Read→
Live show visuals, in short
the things people ask about thisWhat are live show visuals?
Live show visuals are the moving picture that runs behind, around and sometimes through a concert performance: content played back on an LED wall, imagery projection mapped onto scenic objects, and lighting cued against the same timeline. Unlike film, the picture is assembled in a room over a few days, has to survive being loaded into a different venue every night, and is often driven live by a VJ rather than played from a fixed timeline.
What is the difference between concert visuals and a video backdrop?
A backdrop is a screen showing content. Concert visuals treat the whole stage as the surface. The distinction matters because the moment content has to land on something that is not a flat rectangle (a cube, a shell, a scenic build), you need projection mapping or a mapped LED wall, and the content has to be authored to that geometry rather than to a 16:9 frame.
Does a show need both projection and LED?
Frequently, yes, and for opposite reasons. An LED wall is bright enough to compete with stage lighting and reads in daylight at a festival; projection is dark-dependent but will land on curved, irregular and moving surfaces that no panel can cover. Most large touring live show visuals rigs carry both and hand each one the job it is actually good at.
Who runs the picture during the show?
On a timecoded show, a media server plays content against the same clock as the lighting desk and the band. On a show that breathes (a DJ set, an improvising band), a VJ runs it live from clip banks, cutting and layering in response to what is actually happening in the room. Many touring shows are a hybrid: locked sections around free ones.
What is the difference between the craft pages and the production pages?
The craft pages document technique in general terms: how mapping, light programming and previs work, apart from any one show. The production pages record specific shows and the problem each one solved. Most readers arrive on one and need the other, so the pages link across rather than repeating the explanation.