CASE STUDY

Coldplay

Music of the Spheres

Worldwide

Collaborators + Partners

About

Client

Coldplay

Year

2022 - 2023

Reach

13m+ Viewers

Context and Brief

We’ve been navigating a multitude of cosmic expeditions with Coldplay for several years now and each project just gets bigger and better.

Our cosmic journey working with Coldplay began on their live shows in late 2015, with a few promo shows that soon led to the SuperBowl Half-time show with Beyonce, Bruno Mars and Mark Ronson, quickly followed by the 'A Head Full of Dreams' Tour in 2016 which kicked off in Buenos Aires.

Towards the end of 2020, during the dreaded lockdown, we were speaking to Phil Harvey and Misty Buckley about these wild ideas for a sustainable Coldplay show based around their then-upcoming album, Music of the Spheres. The concept of the album itself was so inspiring, and we started putting many ideas together based on many theoretical concepts, including the harmony of the spheres.

Fast forward to 2021 and we commenced a year of global promo shows with Coldplay that eventually led us to Costa Rica in 2022 to kick off the Music of the Spheres World Tour.

Services

Visual Design

Creative Direction

Real-Time Interactive Media

Project Type

Live Show

Context

By the time it came to designing up the tour in early 2022, we’d been living and breathing the Music Of The Spheres cosmos for a long time and had many visuals and ideas to bring to life on the incredible set and screen design.

The new album provided multiple opportunities for further exploration into the Coldplay cosmos. For the opening track, Higher Power, we delved into the aesthetic of the music video and combined the amazing dancing alien holograms with cosmic pixel rain textures. The 10-minute-long epic, Coloratura, became a journey through stunning nebulas, gold particles, worm holes and rainbow light shards. Given the length of the track we worked in Unreal engine to create all the scenes in real-time 3D and save render time.
The new track My Universe, featured K-pop band BTS. We worked with Dimension Studios to incorporate volumetric video captures of the members into the visuals to give the effect of them being beamed into the live show.

Approach

Creative Vision + Art Direction

The tour stage featured a giant crescent screen, circular LED floor and 4 x 360 LED spheres. Our creative process began by taking the designs we had created for the promo shows the year before and adapting them to create seamless immersive visuals across the surfaces on the tour stage. We also revisited and re-worked track creatives from previous years such as Magic, Fix You, Clocks, Paradise and Viva La Vida and brought them into the Music Of The Spheres space.

Thanks to

Phil Harvey (Coldplay Creative Director)
Misty Buckley (Set Designer)
Sam Seager
The Coldplay Video Team

Team

Tom Bairstow (Executive Producer / Director)
Alice Ryland (Producer)
Lydia Caplan (Lead Designer)
Emile Frederick (Lead Video Designer)
Florian Lecoq (Lead Technical Artist)

Motion Design Team:

Dan Richards, Sean Bone, Liam Gilheany, Hasan Nasir, Dana Couling.