Project Description

“Notch has become a key aspect of our pipeline.”

Xite Labs created sensational 360-degree visuals for Latino Trapstar Bad Bunny’s world tour X100pre. Creative Director Vello Virkhaus and Notch Designer Tanner Thompson explain how they created knock-out content in Notch for an unbelievable viewing experience.

Vello Virkhaus, Creative Director, Xite labs

“I’m Vello, co-founder of Xite Labs. Our studio provides comprehensive concept, design, technical and production services for entertainment and corporate clients. We love working in real-time to create new experimental, experiential realities for events such as the LA Philharmonics 100th Anniversary.”

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Tanner Thompson, Notch Designer and Animator, Xite labs

“My background is in VJing and using Cinema 4D, and in the last year Notch. I love the Notch workflow. The integration between Notch, C4D and Adobe has made realising new ideas faster in more tactile fashion.”

Vision

Vello: “Greg and I were on vacation, snowboarding with our families when we got the brief via a phone call from Nino Jimenez of the Buena Vibra Group. He asked us to design content for Bad Bunny’s world tour, X100 Pre. The tour would cover South America, the U.S. and Latin America, with performances at Coachella and Vina Del Mar.”

Production

Vello: “The first thing we did was develop a shared mood board with the client and their creative team; this later evolved into our production storyboard. Notch was integral during early creative development, and later became a huge part of the live show with thirteen different looks created by three Notch artists.”

Tanner: “We wanted to create a system that was fully controllable in Resolume. Richard De Souza helped us integrate a custom TouchDesigner application that translated and controlled the layer switching and variables. The application took Resolume OSC output data and translated and managed that for the Notch machine.”

Vello: “Utilizing Resolume as the main control surface for Notch worked wonderfully on this project and helped us to utilize the programs we love to the best of their abilities.”

Tanner: “This show has a lot of LED screens all of different shapes and sizes. We were able to stack content for different screens Using Notch’s UV Camera with NDI streaming. Stacking was essential for the eight vertical screens hovering above the stage. We also introduced a custom eye-shaped screen for Coachella. We used rendered and live custom content for this screen to create a seamless look.”

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200 Miles Per Hour

Tanner: “This was the first song in the live set. The look picks out Bad Bunny’s signature pink and crushes the pixels. We use a few of Notch’s Glitch effects controlled via OSC to enable live glitching during the performance. The eye-shaped LED has two video sources, one rendered video to frame an affected live-feed. I composited these images using Render to Texture and then mapping the image to the outer eye.”

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Ni Bien Ni Mal

“For this track, we went in the direction of = a low res 8Bit Style. Again we had glitch and frame feedback elements which we could control live. We also used audio-reactive parameters to drive the effects for the vertical screens on the arena shows.”

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Krippy Crush

“This was a fun scene that Richard De Souza developed. There are a lot of different controls on this scene. Particle trails are emitting on the light areas of the camera feed, creating a smokey effect and Notch’s particle systems to a blazing effect. There’s no smoke without fire, so I developed a fire look for the Coachella Eye screen.”

“We were thrilled with the final product. Our control system through Resolume and TouchDesigner was very effective and easy to use. It was awesome creating and VJ’ing content live at Coachella in Notch, using tracer elements and emitting fire from the edges all in real-time.”

Vello: “For me, Coachella was a thrill-ride and a personal victory, I couldn’t have been happier standing there and seeing us hit a home run.”

Credits:

Client: Buena Vibra Group/Bad Bunny
Production Company: Xite Labs
Production Design: Buena Vibra Group, Xite Labs
Creative Direction: Nino Jimenez, Max Perez,Vello Virkhaus, Greg Russell
Notch Designers: Tanner Thompson, Richard De Souza & Mike Estacio
Lighting Designer: Max McDougal
Animators: Ofer Zamora, Danil Tabacari, Grant Davis, Gabriel Hall, Andrew Williams, Tanner Thompson, Fezz Stenton, Kyle Gordon, David Kupferburg, George Berlin, Elad Magdasi, Optical Animal, Volume Tricks.
Equipment Vendor: Nationwide
Media Server: Resolume/ Xite Labs custom