Background

Glastonbury Festival is the largest greenfield music festival in the world. It features world class musical acts along with a melting pot of artistic activities. Arcadia, a performance art collective, are best known for their 50-tonne "Spider" installation at Glastonbury for the past 12 years. This year, they created an entirely new installation; a 140-tonne industrial crane, the centrepiece of which was a world-first fully 360° projection-mapped sphere. From a platform below the sphere, DJs including Carl Cox and Fatboy Slim played to a 60,000-strong crowd. Our brief was to create visually engaging, modular 360°content that was bespoke to each musical artist’s genre across the 3 nights. Working to the theme ‘Pangea’ we took inspiration from the ancient supercontinent and spoke to themes of the dawn of a new era, plus ecological topics such as climate change and extinction rebellion (a key theme at Glastonbury 2019).

Describe the creative idea (40% of vote)

We created three different planets themed on the overarching musical genre of the night. We further broke these themes down into sub-categories to fit various artists on the line-up. Night 1 was techno, so the theme was ‘Tech Planet’, with visuals ranging from machine, metallic and robotic planets to digital information. Night 2 was more mainstream electronic dance music so the theme was ‘Living Planet’ – visuals were organic rocky & foliage planets to elemental lava and fluids, along with more human-based themes of pop-art, sculpture and paintings. Night 3 was intense Drum n Bass, so the theme was ‘Dark Planet’, with visuals being magnetic stars and abstract black holes. Each of these visual assets had varying levels of intensity, allowing us to build a flowing narrative throughout the night, for each artist, and even for particular songs.

Describe the execution (40% of vote)

To maximise the variety of content we had a modular approach, based on tectonic plates of Pangea itself. We worked to a simplified planetary structure, an inner ‘core’, and outer ‘skin’. These were interchangeable, so we could combine various elements for wildly different looks. The core was always an abstract and chaotic element, while the skin was more organised, and fully opened and closed repeatedly, allowing us to seamlessly switch elements in and out on the night. We wanted the sphere to be a living entity that responded to the music, the artists – and of course, the crowd. The skin would open and close as if the sphere was breathing, and the core would pulse as if it was becoming excited. Further, we created a standalone asset called ‘The Eye’ which literally turned the entire sphere into a huge eye that would periodically appear and scan the crowd.

List the results (20% of vote)

The idea, according to Creative Director Pip Rush, “was to take over the sky” and the flame throwing, moon swinging, eye popping, 360° projection-mapped sphere installation did just that! Reaching over 60,000 ravers each night, the installation offered festival goers a primordial world of possibility, taking its inspiration from the prehistoric supercontinent where every land on earth was one and the future was yet to be written. The installation will also evolve over the next five years allowing us the opportunity to build even more interactive experiences. Producing more than 12 hours of content to entertain festival goers for 3 days, for 4 hours each day took hundreds of man hours to deliver and required on the ground support to ensure artist driven, bespoke content was created. Described as a must see for the festival, Somerset Live* said it was “a triumph of scale, might and sheer imagination”.