DUA LIPA’S FUTURE NOSTALGIA WORLD TOUR

Long before the pandemic, Dua Lipa’s team reached out to Luke Halls Studio in search of video content to support the pop star’s second album, Future Nostalgia. Their brief was simple yet overwhelmingly expansive and left room for many possibilities: they were told to follow the album’s namesake and come up with something futuristic that simultaneously recalled the past.

Dua and Creative Director/Stage Designer Es Devlin already had strong motifs and themes they wanted to explore. They had a keen vision to support the bowl-shaped LED screen serving as the hero of the show’s stage design. When COVID-19 postponed the show for two years, that opened up room to develop their ideas without bounds.

As things evolved, the creative team decided to capture multiple distinct decades and refine their looks as explicit worlds influenced by the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, respectively. Their initial theme became more and more prescient as events unfolded, and people worldwide wanted, more and more, to get out and celebrate in a shared space, an activity that now seemed confined to the past.

They used Notch for its hyper-stylised video effects supporting the moods of certain songs. At one point, a nightclub ceiling lowered over Dua and the dancers to make it feel as if they and the audience weren’t at a massive venue but, instead, in a more intimate club setting. They amplified this effect with an echoed blur effect, which added the spaced-out feeling of long exposure.

Additional press coverage:

The Guardian, Variety, Rolling Stone, NYLON.