DERMOT KENNEDY DESIGN PROCESS
VISUAL REFERENCES
Dermot Kennedy is an Irish artist who’s music lives in the spectrum between the acoustic singer / song-writer vibe of the bucolic natural beauty of his home-town of Rathcoole, and the more urban-inspired electronic beats and production. The tension between the intimate heart of his writing and the complexity of production was what I was exploring with the production design of his Live Without Fear tour. The jumping-off point with the design was his interest in incorporating trees, but not necessarily in a literal way.
I have been obsessed with trees and their symbolism for a while, and am interested in how the vein structure of trees is so universal, showing up as similar patterns and structures in the human nervous system, for example, or blood vessels, etc. Below are some of the particularly interesting visual references that inspired the design.
A screenshot from Dermot Kennedy's "Moments Passed" music video.
This was a progress photo of a model tree I was making for "Once On This Island". I posted this on Instagram and it eventually led to me getting this design job
Another photo of a twisted wire tree sculpture I made a few years ago. I was fascinated with how this looked a lot like the inside of my eyeball
This is actually a photograph of the inside of my eyeball. I love how this branching structure of veins shows up in trees, roots, nerves, etc.
This is someone else's incredible close-up photograph of the outside of an eyeball with veins that really look like trees (or maybe they are and this was done in photoshop?)
Michael Häuslers computer simulation of pyramidal neurons in the cerebral cortex. This was an interesting "location" to set this very internal and cerebral music...
I made a connection between the branching delivery systems found in nature and the human made systems of tubular data and information delivery
Tom Price's beautiful installation piece showing how another artist was playing with using human-made materials to express organic and natural ideas
I see these all over the place when I'm walking in the world - conduits in the subway system, soda delivery tubes behind a drink machine at the grocery store...
RENDERINGS
With all of those inspirational images floating around my brain, I started exploring these ideas in the context of a touring concert design, playing with the idea that a concert is in itself a series of tubular delivery systems, moving power, data, and sound around a space. The following renderings (modeled and rendered by Evan Alexander using Cinema 4D, Corona Renderer, Redshift & Photoshop) show the development of the design.
This first design proved to be too difficult to tour, and the trees were very prominent and ever-present
One of the challenges was how to incorporate the need for a large upstage wall of video content with the more dimensional sculptural twisted tube / tree / neural network elements
I ended up exploring the use of a "transparent" LED video wall which allowed the tree elements to exist beyond (upstage), and to have their visibility controllable
This transparent LED wall / video screen also allowed moving shafts of backlight to push through
An image on the screen could supersede the trees if desired
LOAD-IN / REHEARSALS
These images help show the relationship of the elements that I’m describing above - the see-through LED screen, which essentially acts as a traditional theatrical sharks tooth scrim where you can see through it if something behind it is lit, and it can become opaque if it’s dark behind it - or if it’s illuminated. We played with mixing these things too so we could have either-or, and…
in this work light photograph of the rehearsal studio, you can see the large video wall with the three "tree" sculptures upstage of it
The tree sculptures each had two twisted tubes of addressable LED tape, which essentially are flexible linear video screens
a close-up photo showing how transparent the video screen is when it's not lit (work light conditions)
this photo under show conditions, with no video content on the screen and just the tree tubes lit
an example of combining video content of points and rays of light, with actual rays of light coming from moving lights through the screen, and also points of pixels lit up within the tree tubes - all working together to make a scene with greater depth
An example of combining video image with back lighting and letting the trees disappear. Also playing with the screen grid and window grid imagery
playing with back-lighting the screen to accentuate the structural grid of the screen, and seeing how the white pixels of the birds make that part of the screen nearly opaque
A close-up of the LED screen showing how tiny and far apart the actual pixels are
Mixing imag (image magnification) with trees...
PRODUCTION PHOTOS
Here are some production photographs taken by Duncan McLean (video designer). See PORTFOLIO / TV/FILM/CONCERTS / DERMOT KENNEDY for the full collection of production photos and credits.
