VOLTA
Cirque du Soleil

VOLTA is the new "under the big top" production from le Cirque du Soleil. This 2hour long odissey was written by Bastien Alexandre and the original score is composed by M83 (Anthony Gonzalez).

Within the GENTILHOMME Boutique in Montreal and alongside Multimedia Designer Thibaut Duverneix, I designed and directed over an hour of content that is a central piece of the show. Most of the time narative, sometimes contextual or simply just decorative, the images produced span from live footage, photorealistic 3d, 2d vj sets or generative art reacting to the great score of M83, performed live every evening. The whole content was conceptualized and programed in such a way that it can adapt to any sort of slight timing changes due to the acrobats performance, so the audience see a new show every evening.

The whole multimedia conception took over a year, from the earliest sketches to the world premiere in march 2017. VOLTA is now on the road, touring worlwide for many years. You can check if the cirucs is near you → HERE

Credits

Multimedia Designer: Thibaut Duverneix
Director: Mathieu Babin
Creative Producer: Marie-Lou Bouchard
Producer: Dominic Lavigne - 4u2c
Motion Designer: Geoffrey Skrajewski
Motion Designer: Josselin Bey
Motion Designer: David Baril - 4u2c
Motion Designer: Frédéric Mathieu - 4u2c
Creative Coder - Epix Designer: Dage - La Boite Interactive
Creative Coder: Fred Trétout
Creative Coder: Daniel Iregui
Film Production: 1976
Executive Producer: Nicolas Comeau
Cinematographer: Jessica Lee-Gagné
Editors: Akim Gagnon/Thibaut Duverneix
Colorist: Charles-Etienne Pascal
Technical Design: Olivier Gagnon/20k
Technical Design: Nicolas Gendron

Pre-Production

One of the main challenge on such a big and long production was to keep some sort of coherence between all the different acts and also give proper direction to a very diverse team. I've produced contless documents during the pre production period, such as this colorscript, to start setting up the mood/colors of each acts. 

I also have divided our led cube screens with these guidelines, so each artists could follow theses lines to produce some content but, we still could transition between any of them smoothly. It also gave us the oportunity to create some optical illusion for the audience. Adittionaly, I would produce a video timeline for each acts (5-6mins) with a reference of everything that would happened on the stage and our broadcast support (Cube, Tvs, Led Epix...)