Electronic Countermeasures
Electronic Countermeasures
Electronic Countermeasures was back for a second tour with The 1975 for the worldwide ABIIOR (A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships) and Music for Cars Tour, to create a monumental manic visual feast that tapped into the anxieties of today while bringing back fan favorites from the last tour. A total of 55 looks were created for the show using some Electronic Countermeasures’ specialties like 2D/3D CG, analog video synthesis, and live-action practical effects, alongside a range of new experimental techniques including photogrammetry.
The stage consisted of 25 screen surfaces including a massive, vertically-oriented 80 foot LED canvas with retracting cave independently automated LED cuboids, three massive frames, video-mapped lighting fixtures, LED riser fascia, and treated IMAG. Monumental scale and excess to the point of surrealism was the visual goal, flooding the fan’s eyes with images akin to the continuous stream of images one scrolls through on a typical interaction with a social media feed.
The imagery oscillated from photo-realistic naturalism to minimalist geometry to degraded failing abstraction and aggressive noise punctuated with ephemeral fields of light and color. A clash of minimalism meets maximalism with cameras and travelators and larger than life mobile phones. The horrors of this post-post-modern world we can’t escape made monumental.
Fields of colored particles abstracting pastoral green overcast fields and the derelict and decrepit architecture of 1970s Britain, seen through the imperfect lens of a camera extracting three-dimensional data through an experimental photogrammetry process. Blurring the line between our familiar and recognizable landscape and that of the eye of the computer. In this dystopian vision, even reality is rendered as tiny points of data and light
The present ultimately feeds back into itself with light landing upon fields of prisms casting light and potential alternate realities across the immense screens reflecting in the smartphones and eyes of fans and onlookers.
I’m not sure if we’ve made it but we’ve made something that is larger than any singular individual could tackle and with that thanks to our spectacular team of talented artists.
Credits
VIdeo Design, Screens Producer, and Animation: Electronic Countermeasures
Animators: Tempe Hale, Meejin Hong, and Julian Petschek
Hand Process Animator & Live Action Assistant: Melody Yenn
Stop Motion Animator: Amber Padgett
Photogrammetry & Rendering: Oliver Franklin Anderson
Still Image Compositor: Erica Larson Dockray
Lighting & Production Design: Tobias Rylander
Lighting Director/Programmer: Darren Purves
Media Server Programmer: Morgan Brown
Pre-visualization powered by disguise designer. Media servers by Green Hippo. Additional formerly real-time effects made possible by Notch.