Stage backdrop videos for Audrey's summer 2026 festival run. She gave me a kind of scavenger hunt of prompts for each of the 14th songs and let me run with it from there. Brought Ryan back for the studio ones. Was fun thinking about the videos being 50 feet tall.
Some selected clips from the project:
Pretty bad documentation footage I got in the crowd at Outside Lands:
Stage visuals for Audrey Hobert's iHeart Radio Jingle Ball 2025 dates in Los Angeles and Chicago. Pushed me to try more traditional stop-motion animation for the first time. I brought Ryan Brennan on to build some miniatures and a frozen pond set we needed for the project.
Below are some reworked assets from the project. Felt important to make these as definitive artifacts since the project was kind of ephemeral, single-use. Here's what the IMAG layouts looked like formatted for the screens on stage:
Two big triangular columns on the sides, a short and wide screen down on the stage, and a big jumbotron screen up above. The crack in the middle of the screen is where the live feed of Audrey would go. I tried to integrate this live feed into the world of each animation: A hole in the ice on a frozen pond, a tear in the side of a present, nestled inside an ornament on a tree (this one proved too difficult unfortunately...)
Here's a few clips I shot from my seat at the LA concert: Ryan carrying the frozen pond to my house
Janky setup at home, with the Target plastic bag softbox, overhead camera on the clamp
Camera reveal. As you can see in the second image, one of the cameras was making everything purple in low light and one wasn't. Using these fully automatic bootleg cameras on a project like this felt completely irrational by the end. I feel like I'm always bumping into the ceiling of the gear I'm using, but that's also where interesting stuff tends to happen...
This image gives me chills. One of the worst looking setups I've ever seen. This was a dark moment trying to get the project over the finish line.
The wonderful, beloved creatures Ryan made, piled up on the frozen pond set.
Their current location in my apartment six months later, Spring 2026.
