I led a team of six animators for Lady Gaga's Joanne world tour, working in collaboration with creative directors. The animation was designed for stadium sized screen walls, arrays of transparent LED pixels mounted on multiple hydraulic dance stages, and colossal blimps that received a multi-projector wraparound image.
Lada Gaga Joanne Tour
My responsibilities included:
- Supervising animation to maintain an aggressive delivery schedule.
- Worked closely with creative directors to interpret their vision and created a technical plan for motion design and visual effects for the entire run of show.
- Technical direction and problem solving of animation for a multi image projection method that hadn't been tested or even built.
- Used knowledge of 2D and 3D animation workflows to create a pipeline for completed animated assets to convert to UV maps to achieve seamless projection.
- Worked closely with the editorial lead to support visual effects for pre show videos and interstitials.
Sometime in early 2017 I got an urgent call from a producer I was barely acquainted with. They had an issue with an after effects animation and just couldn't crack it. I remember coming into their West Hollywood office late in the evening. It smelled like chinese food, and everyone was standing around a PC looking dejected. For the life of me I can't remember what was even wrong with the animation, but within three minutes I had fixed it.
Maybe it was just one of those things that only fresh eyes can fix. In any case, they had a laundry list of animations they were behind on and I took a look at all of them and had a solution to each one in turn.
It was the animation equivalent of Slumdog Millionaire, I just had the answers.
That unlikely interview, and the cheerfulness I brought to the post production room kept me employed regularly until I left Los Angeles. Those producers were Jarod Shannon and Eddy P. Delmont, of Team Win Studios in LA. And through them I met the creative directors that dreamt the insane dreams that made Lady Gaga's reality. Andrea Gelardin and Ruth Hogben of Lobster Eye have a kind of artistic brilliance that can only be described as absolutely bonkers.
Later that year we all crammed into a studio together for months to produce the visuals for Lady Gaga's 2017 world tour "Joanne".
You'll forgive me if I don't have better documentation of the live show. We weren't allowed to bring proper equipment in the venue, and besides this was our moment of glory after all that hard work. Even after making it, we couldn't believe the sheer scale of the show and the props onto which our animation was being projected.
