Project Role: Executive Producer
Our second immersive weekend experience in Taos, New Mexico.
Knowing that most festival-goers are in a younger age demographic, Taos Vortex 2019 sought to capture them via bolder graphic design, a second stage programmed with dance music and hip hop/RnB, and energetic video ads.
‘Three days of live music, adventure, experimental interactions, and friends. Dive in!’
Taos Vortex 2019 allowed for lessons learned from 2018 to be applied to 2019 regarding user flow by making the art environment more obvious and vending more peripheral. We were also able to deliver greater fidelity to the brand’s creative.
The logo and the colorways were the cornerstone of the creative meant to evoke New Mexico sunsets and fun in the night with eye-popping gradients: blue for the darkness of night and fuchsia for ecstatic fun within it. The isometric logo was intended to convey the depth of the experience - one travels across, down, and thru the logo, just as one travels thru their weekend festival experience.
Isometric logos are powerful for the depth they provide. On the other hand, we learned from this logo, which is basically a square, to keep in mind wide applications such as billboards. There was no way to make this logo wider to fill an entire billboard.
Many experiences begin digitally. As the project’s creative director, I wanted people to step through the digital reality of the website and ticketing and into a world that reflected the same colorway as an extension of that experience. That digital experience is flat; the physical experience makes it come to life. Art direction and graphic design work hand-in-hand. It was my job to make sure that connection and communication was fluid.
Festivals are for mass experiences where thousands of people gather to take in their favorite artist. Simultaneously, we saw the need to provide space for close moments for small groups as well. We regarded the chill out huts as a way to deliver space for those tight-knit experiences. Individual artists from the company were given parameters along with the creative to build huts according to their vision that deepened the Vortex weekend. Newt Russell created this hut.
The main stage was an excellent example of managing myriad requirements— weight, wind safety, installer safety, rigging, and fidelity to the festival’s creative as well as to the brand. For this stage, we used geodesic shapes with a dichroic film. The geodesic shapes allowed for a modular configuration, instead of following a rigid plan, allowing for a faster, less supervised installation. This is a glorious photo of the dichroic, however, the dichroic didn’t take all lights: lights that were toward the blue end of the spectrum made the film invisible. We failed to test the dichroic film under all foreseeable lights. This was a striking lesson learned in quality for me and my team.
Amelia Stickney, director of performance, and Sofie Cruse, art director, discuss the creative, its narrative, and their process.
Colossal Collective (left) and Fungineers (right) perform together on the immersive experience stage. At one point in the weekend, Reggie Watts did an impromptu performance with the Fungineers inside of their Ice Cream Truck.
Behind the performers, is some secret sauce— the Cell On Wheels donated by Verizon in order to provide for more bandwidth for the Vortex attendees. Ideally the weekend of experiences is engaging enough that people don’t need to use their cell phones. Simultaneously, what keeps people on their cells more than not being able to get a hold of their friends or their mother when they need to due to lousy service? We saw a lack of signal, due to the number of attendees drawing on a rural network, as a pain point in the user journey that we needed to solve for.