In 2023 Human Person reached out to commission visuals for Calvin Harris’ long awaited return to Coachella’s main stage.
The selected concept was simple: Take the spectral data hidden within the audio of the song, and create something beautiful.
The target infrastructure was also simple yet tangibly difficult : Target an LED wall resolution greater than 10,000 pixels wide.
To handle the oversized canvas resolution, I created an optimized pipeline with custom shaders in TouchDesigner. This enabled real time editing at native resolution with lowered detail, to streamline musical automation of parameters, while still supporting slower-than-realtime exports at full quality. This pipeline allowed for repeated full resolution exports for client review on a single high powered computer, without the need for expensive cluster rendering typically associated with resolutions above 8K.
The final piece ultimately debuted to more than 100,000 concertgoers during Calvin Harris’ Returning To The Desert set on April 15th, 2023.