Throw Your Phone In A Lake

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Art Direction & Motion Design
New Nostalgia ✶ Devon Stern
2022

Throw Your Phone into a Lake is a themed party put on by the DJ trio New Nostalgia and their collaborators. The event transports guests to a remote lake far from the complexities of our digital lives requiring them to give up their phones and progress to a simpler time.

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Over the course of the night, New Nostalgia wanted guests to experience distinct changes in environments driven by 5 DJ sets.

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To capture this, I worked with New Nostalgia on a 5 act structure that builds its narrative intensity with color and lighting while also reflecting the idea of simpler times through 64 bit inspired graphics and textures. Animations were built as layers for Resolume Arena with various transitions and effects to allow the VJ to react to the music.

With a tight timeline and only working part-time, I needed to augment my workload somehow. To do so, I enlisted Midjourney’s incredible image generation tool to provide rapid iterations based on my art direction.

This allowed me to focus on the broad strokes and only get into the details once the New Nostalgia team had selected approved designs inspired by the AI’s iterations.