Reuko designed the opening visuals for Subtronics' TESSERACT tour in the US which kicked off at The Armory in Minneapolis earlier this month.
We asked Reuko to tell us more about the project:
"For Subtronics Alien Communications visualizer, we were drawn to the concept of dormant ancient alien vessels scattered across an otherworldly realm, when suddenly a signal arrives that awakens these ancient beacons, and chaotic energy erupts in every direction.
“The first thing that I finished was actually the (first) drop, going heavy on the chaotic particle storm, strobing lights and lasers out of this alien pyramid vessel. We were all digging that right away, and Jesse and Ray Elemento, the legendary content director, let me run free with adding in variations and inversions that we would cut between to match the shifting energy in the music.”
The tricky thing was finding a way to transition between these different takes seamlessly without losing the flow and pace. We imagined that the vessel is less of a purely destructive death ray, but also an overpowered radio tower, sending and receiving signals from the unknown. From that concept it was natural to modify the structure of the vessel, giving it a portal/gateway that we traverse through to jump around the realm. Some of my favorite moments of this piece are when we’re flying through that triangular corridor, especially during the bridge to the second half of the track.
After we jammed that out, we needed to build a world around it to give it context, so I crafted a bunch of ambient landscapes to hint at the lore and history of this otherworld. The music was our north star for the pacing and narrative arc, following the slowly building atmospheric and psychedelic textures in the first act of the track, and converting this building energy into a visual punch in the face when the drop happens.
The second half of the music is a totally different genre, a big shift from the dubstep energy in the first half to something more EDM style. Often with visualizers today, you’ll see a handful of scenes or shots reused and looped, but we were so stoked on expanding this world and seeing it from as many angles as we could. The style shift in the middle demanded a completely different perspective, going from whipping movements of aggressive stop-and-go with the first drop, to a constantly forward-moving flight across this otherworld to close out the track.
The beauty of working with a toolset like Unreal Engine 5 is that we can build fast, so if we realize that the storyboard has a gap and we need an extra scene or variation, it’s pretty quick to get that set up. That invites a creative pace that’s more like jamming in a band, and it really gets my juices pumping to see a final vision/product coming together in real-time."
