On Wednesday, November 16, 2022, UT College of Fine Arts (COFA) School of Design of Creative Technologies (SCDT) threw an event called Ride The Synthwave. It was a synthwave-inspired, large-scale collaborative project incorporating students with skillsets across the entire spectrum of Arts and Entertainment Technologies (AET). I personally worked on this event for two of my classes in the Fall 2022 semester, Live Event Engineering with Professor Matt Smith, as well as Themed Entertainment Design taught by Professor Mk Haley.
Early in the semester, I was chosen to volunteer as a Production Assistant at Live Design International (LDI) in Las Vegas. Given my passion for Lighting and other Live Event Technologies, I couldn’t be more excited about this opportunity. It did, however, require my presence for the entirety of the conference, November 14th-20th, directly conflicting with the event and the entire week around it.
Unfortunately, I was out of town before load-in even began. This definitely impacted how I could contribute to the event, so I did as much preparation as possible to help set up my projects in advance. To witness and document my work, I sent my roommate to go in my honor to see how it went in person.
Promotional poster for the event (image curtesy of UT SDCT)
Live Event Engineering
For Live Event Engineering, I worked over the majority of the semester in collaboration with two student composers from another AET class working on this event, Professor Chris Ozley’s Interactive Music. We were only required to do one collaboration each, but there were a few extra students in the music class so there was an opportunity to take on some extra work, a challenge that I was very excited to take on.
My role was to design unique lighting cues for their live music performances, submitting updated deliverables and documentation over three checkpoints and three milestones. We started designing on the PLAI Lab lighting plot while the final show plot was finalized. This allowed us time to have a complete design on the PLAI Lab rig and document the whole show with haze while our performers played their compositions live for the whole class.
I really enjoyed working with these two particular composers because they both had different adaptations of the Synthwave genre, which allowed me to stretch my creativity and diversify my programming skills.
Jaxsun Lightfoot
PLAI Lab performance with composer Jaxsun Lightfoot in preparation for Ride The Synthwave event
When Jaxsun and I initially met to discuss the possibility of collaborating on this process, his vision of Synthwave seemed very idyllic and reflected the optimism of the 80s with lush pads filling out pulsing melodies. It seemed to mesh well with the color palette I had initially proposed, which was full of dreamy pinks and hazy purples, reminiscent of a cotton-candy sunset. From there, we shared a very solid creative vision for this piece, allowing us to experiment within the tone we had agreed upon early in the process. Further, Jaxsun was in his last semester of Grad school to become a computer engineer and had therefore decided to take this class purely as a creative outlet. This helped us to stay calm and just have fun with this project, one of the reasons I believe it was a huge success.
The main consideration of this performance was Jaxson's emphasis on live performance and improvisation. Since I would be unable to busk on show day, I did have to eventually pre-program my cues with waits set to run through the entire show by clicking "Go" once. To balance this, I programmed the PLAI Lab performance to function autonomously using Waits but left simple "pockets" of simple spotlight for Jaxsun to freely improvise during certain sections that I busked live.
Some key terms in my design process: smooth, funky, fun, dazzling, "pop"-y, and bright.
Belice Rivarola
PLAI Lab performance with composer Belice Rivarola in preparation for Ride The Synthwave event
I took a very different but equally satisfying approach to this same project in my collaboration with Belice. We had already been friends and wanted to collaborate before the opportunity arose, so we instantly knew that we would want to work together. We also shared a similar desired aesthetic when it came to Synthwave, a more dystopian and industrial spin on a seemingly commercialized genre. Belice suggested a "dark synth" approach to the composition and I wanted to emphasize that sound by juxtaposing two visually harsh color schemes: red/white and green/purple. Belice didn't want to do much improvisation, so I was able to pre-program the entire thing to run at one push of "go."
Some key terms in my design process: high-contrast, sharp, spooky, fun, hardcore
Themed Entertainment Design
For Themed Entertainment Design, we were assigned to contribute to “the ambiance” of this event. While it is a somewhat vague assignment, I immediately had two ideas come to mind. Mk had mentioned that there were several (expensive!!!) monitors, but also that one of her students from another class needed help using Arduino programming to implement a lighting element to their project. After learning that the aforementioned student was my friend Peter, I decided to assist with this project as my contribution. Due to the high volume of documentation, I have created a separate page containing further details on this project, which is linked here.
See more about Ride the Synthwave