So then, we had that company export the visuals into alpha channels, which is characters, main moving elements, and backgrounds, and I flew out Ghostdad and he came to North Carolina with me and we spent 4 days dusk till dawn without ever leaving the house, editing video to music, and I’d say about 50% of the looks in the show came from just that, stuff where there’s two characters on each side of the screen and it’s black and there’s an abstract element in the middle.
#Porter robinson worlds live visuals full#
The edit was not correctly timed, it was too many full screen looks, it wasn’t minimal enough, there was too much overlap between the scenes. The process of getting all those visuals made was I think a 4 or 5 month process and by the time they were finished, the only things that we really had were characters and backgrounds, so any of the looks you see in the show–well basically, we got an edit of the show, where we had that company cut the visuals to the music, and we used none of it. We sent these two documents to 7 companies who all specialize in creating tour visuals, and they all sent back motion demos, they sent back examples of what they thought I might want, and I went with a company called Imaginary Light Network, who seemed to best grasp the vision, and from there they would send, say, 50 hand-drawn ideas for something, be it a character or a landscape or an abstract idea, and I would approve some number of those and then I would give directions and say “this is wrong” or “this is too whatever”, and oftentimes I would just propose a completely unique idea and say, “let’s have a scene that looks like this”, I would describe it and take the reigns on it. This is kind of a long answer I made two documents, one of them was a mood board, which was a collection of 200ish images that were all in the theme of Worlds, everything that felt like Worlds to me, and the second document was a style bible which was 18 pages of written instruction for every artist I work with, that includes the concept art, all the covers for the songs, all the music videos, and the tour visuals, so they were all referencing these two documents that I created. So these things were kind of going on concurrently. Meanwhile, I was making an effort to search for a company that could do hand-drawn animation so I could realize the ideas I had in my head for the visuals for the show. That was a two and a half month process, it was exhausting. So I would say it was a two and a half month process of getting all the Worlds project files to a place where I had them exported into multitracks that, when combined, would perfectly recreate the original instrumental, because there were a few instances where there was one instrument that had somehow gotten into every … It took me weeks and weeks of experimentation to find a method that would allow absolutely no crossover, where all the automation would be applied correctly so that when all the multitracks were combined it would be an exact replication of the original project. It started off with me trying to get my project files to a place where instruments were even in the same channels… I use FL Studio and I’m not respectful of “lanes” so I just throw kicks into random lanes. The first thing I realized I needed to do was to organize my music sufficiently so that I could easily export those into multitracks. Could you walk through the process of creating the live experience? With the visual work with Ghostdad and the multitracks/triggering different parts. If you’re a big Porter fan, you’ll appreciate his lengthy responses. So after a 30-minute discussion with him, I decided it would be best to present his answers as-is, with no trimming or paraphrasing.
I wanted to formulate questions that weren’t cliche or overdone, to really get an understanding of how Worlds came to be and the process behind it all. Most will recognize it as the venue where Porter Robinson called out ragers at his show, but I remember it as the place where I experienced the Worlds live show and got to pick Porter’s mind following his performance. The Canopy Club: a relatively small, intimate live setting in Urbana, IL (just a couple minutes’ walk from my dorm room at University of Illinois).