Lollapalooza Event Package & Title Sequence

Lolla 2020

Lollapalooza is a massive music festival that takes place in Grant Park, Chicago each summer. Known for its wide range of genres, Lolla becomes one large mashup of audiences and artists. Most notable is the juxtaposition of Grant Park within Chicago. Grant Park is a massive green park surrounded by incredibly tall skyscrapers. We loved the idea that Lolla is in the epicenter of nature and technology. Nicole Colvin, Jayson Hahn, and I set out to make a brand package for the event focused around that idea.

The Concept

For this music festival title sequence, we highlighted the unique qualities of Lollapalooza while utilizing both 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional design elements. We took 3D music-related items and mixed them with 2D natural elements. The main headliners have their own “stages” representing the many stages at Lolla. As the sequence closes, all 3 different scenes combine, representing the mashup of artists.

Concept Development

We began by creating 3 word lists. This helped guide us when thinking of compositions during the early stages.

Iconography
Boom Box
Floppy Disk
Macintosh
Walkman
Record Player
iPod
Diskman
Cassette Tapes

Nature Elements
Leafy Plants
Tropical Flowers
Water | Fish Tank
Fire | Electricity
Mushrooms
Space
Galaxy
Trees

Overall Design
Fun
Colorful
Youthful/Playful
Music
Technology
Nature
Nostalgia
Mash-up

We then gathered reference images to help define our style. The image of the grass growing from the keyboard was a perfect example of what we wanted to create, and the computer fish tank also made its way into the final piece.

Our color palette started from the Lollapalooza red and turquoise. We expanded on the palette with a darker blue and yellow for more contrasting values.

Now that we had our idea, we were ready to begin storyboarding.

Storyboard

Some early iterations of our concept included a guitar pedal board that would trigger the effects when a character turned them on. Most of our scenes also had a single 3D object in space and an element. While we liked this concept, we found that simply letting the elements and technology live together in a full scene worked better conceptually and visually. Here are some of those earlier ideas:

Early Styleframes

While our early styleframes had the right idea with the 2D/3D integration, we felt that the overall scenes needed to be fully-realized. We kept what we liked and pushed on!

All 3 Nicole’s put our heads together and decided that our piece needed more Chicago and Lollapalooza. We put in the trees, the stages, and a skyline to signify Grant Park.

2D and 3D Development

One revelation we had was using the camera settings in Redshift to create a fisheye effect. Because of the distortion, the sets and models needed to be placed and stretched in a new way. It helped make our compositions more dynamic. Nicole C. and Jayson did a fantastic job making the new camera effect work, as well as the overall compositions.

2D Animated Elements

I had the awesome job of creating the 2D elements throughout the piece. The elements I chose were Fire, Earth, and Water. Fire represented by electricity and the flume, earth being the Lizzo plants, and water being the computer fish tanks. I used Cel or Vector animation depending on the element. Programs I used include Adobe After Effects, Adobe Animate, Illustrator, and Photoshop.