Boomtown Fair is one of the UK’s biggest music festivals and their immense production value attracts some of the best creative talent in the events industry. It’s an incredibly immersive festival that evolves every year, set in a theatrical pop up city, that is home to an eclectic array of musicians performing and enormous stages designed by some of the world’s leading stage production companies. We’re proud to have been working with them since 2013 designing and directing animated creative content.

We’ve worked with the creative team on a diverse range of animated content from logo idents to stage visualisations to walkaround site maps. Boomtown is the result of a huge team of artists and performers of many disciplines and working with them always makes for the opportunity to collaborate with a variety of other artists.

One of our favourite projects is the logo ident. A golden emblem that constructs itself in an empty space, representative of the way that every year a few empty fields are transformed into a small city in the matter of a few weeks. The pieces come together forming a solid golden symbol suspended within an inverted purple planet, a visual metaphor for the inside out reality that Boomtown has to offer.

After receiving some feedback about the sound distribution at some of the stages the sound technicians saw this as an opportunity to innovate a new strategy for the main arenas at the event. Our long running relationship with Boomtown made us the ideal candidate to collaborate with them to create an exciting animation to demonstrate this new concept.

We took some technical visualisations from the sound engineers and used these as a basis to create a short video about the revolutionary new arena sound systems at the event.

One of the first projects we worked on with Boomtown was a flythrough of one of the festivals streets. This led to conversations of a bigger vision to push the concept further and create a virtual model of the entire festival to create more similar videos and other 2D content for promotional use. The first step toward this goal was a 3D map of the festival.

Working closely with the team we used concept artwork from the set builders and a site map to create a characterised virtual model of Boomtown and in 2015 this was launched as the holding page for their website. As a bonus we created an additional winter version that was used a temporary alternative throughout the festive season.

In addition to this we created a second map that is more geographically correct, taking a vectorised site map from the graphics team and adding additional details in 3D. We then animated a walkaround explainer video as a way of introducing the public to the changes to the festival's layout. This 3D version of the map has also been used in the festival guide book.

Boomtown is a constantly evolving place with new stages and districts appearing every year and we work alongside the team to bring these new creations to life and tantalise the audience. This content has always been driven by the event’s backstory and the premise for these promos has ranged from Mayan temples to Wild West gold mines to derelict nuclear reactors. The stage designs are usually still in development when we receive a brief giving us a lot of creative freedom when piecing together a storyboard.

Since our first project with Boomtown they have come back to us time and again to create more content and the success of this work has led to us being trusted with the creation of their logo ident and official trailer. We’re proud to be a part of their journey and are really excited about or next adventure with them.