The latest iteration of Joji’s wildly eclectic career shows that the former YouTube personality has transitioned into a seriously successful musician on a raved-about global tour. For a performer who has conquered multiple genres and media, this year’s SOLARIS tour could not be business as usual.
FRAY Studios took on the design role, along with Cassius Creative, to create a unique video environment that helps the Japanese-Australian artist perfectly frame his new album, Piss in the Wind, in arenas around the world.
FRAY Studios and Cassius Collective have worked together on multiple projects before, including Glass Animals, and Adam Young and Dan Hill of Cassius have known each other since college.
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For FRAY, the project brief essentially asked if it could be more interesting than a big back wall of LED with the band in front of it? The answer was a resounding, ‘Yes, yes it can.’
Adam Young talked to Live Design about “framing Joji” in space.
Live Design: You have set the artist within four separate “frames” of LED screen that create perspective leading to the back of the stage, but also creates moments where the artist is floating in space. How did you come up with the idea and did you have to compromise much to make it work?
Adam Young: In previous tours he’s used a lot of video and elevated platforms, so we knew what he likes and thought, how can we reshape this into something else?
His music is so varied, from full hip-hop tracks to really slow, emotional ballads, that we wanted to create something that can support the breadth of genres that he goes through in a single show. Putting him in the center of focus is one of the reasons why it looks so great. Because it isn't just IMAG where you're looking at a screen closeup at the side of the stage while you miss what the artist is actually doing. Here, Joji is inside a portal almost, and it draws the focus to him.
When we first had the idea and were working out what the shape and space could be, we thought, ‘This would look amazing in reality!’ but we were not sure if anyone would agree to pay for it. We figured we might as well put it forward and see what happened. Luckily, they got our vision immediately and it maintained its authenticity all the way through from the pitch to the final build, which is why it feels as big and impressive as it does. There were no compromises because they were not scared to commit to it.
Normally, logistics and money are the two things that will alter a design because it has to be tourable and fit in a certain number of trucks. It feels quite rare that we just kept getting green lights and kept going.
LD: You and Dan Hill both started out studying lighting design at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, how did you transition into video?
AY: I spent most of my time at university shadowing people, interning, and finding work experience because I knew that I wanted to work in video. It was very much just some projectors and a VGA cable and people with some hopes and dreams trying to make it work. I was primarily in theater and opera for a long time which is where the work was and then lots of commercial musicals until I made the jump into live music. We all had to teach ourselves and experiment as university wasn't really set up to teach it at that point.
LD: The gear on Joji is a bit more advanced than that.
AY: Yes! Screens one, two, and three are all DV5. And then screen four is Vanish, and then it has a whole back wall of lighting built in behind that Vanish screen.
It was interesting making the content because the center of the image where you would normally focus everything isn't there—it’s cut out and removed to make space for Joji. So you're trying to make content around the actual focal point.
We had to really think about how to build it in all four layers at the same time, to make one big image but filling the gap in the last screen. It was quite challenging and took a while to work out how to make things move properly.
The first things we started with were shapes and blocks of color, just to work out what movements across these screens feel pleasing. For instance, if everything is moving in one direction, what does that feel like versus all the screens moving in opposing directions at the same time?
I played with the depth and different combinations of shapes and movements to see what filled these screens nicely. One of the things that we learnt really early on is you cannot just repeat the same thing on all four screens because it kills the depth. So every single screen has to be unique compared to the one in front of it to really give it definition and separation as you look at the image. It definitely stops you being lazy and trying to repeat things! Everything has to be made four times over with different scaled dimensions to fill the whole stage surface.
We also had to take into account where you're looking at it from: at the front, quite a lot of the middle screens are hidden by the screen to the front of him. But as soon as you shift over to the side, you can see down into the wings of all the other screens. You have to imagine how it will look from both the front perspective and the sides where you're seeing it at a 45-degree angle and the layers are much clearer.
The idea was to make the screens as wide as they could possibly be so from most places in the arena you never see the black edge at the side of the stage, it's always LED screen. The front screen is around twenty-seven meters wide by fourteen tall.
LD: What did you use for pre-viz?
AY: We imported 3D models it into After Effects so we could work on the four individual screens and then put them all in the right place. It was an easy way of referencing how things looked from different angles.
Before the rest of the team joined, I probably spent six or seven weeks designing all the individual looks and working through what each track should look like. When the rest of the team joined and there were six of us, from start to finish working on all the animation and TouchDesign, was about five and a half weeks. Every time someone new would join the team, for the first three days they wouldn’t get anything done because they would just look at it and try to figure out how to make it work. How to animate something to fill these screens that worked with the perspective. After a few days in there would be this moment when it clicked and they’d realize "Oh, I get it now."
LD: What are you using to run the content?
AY: It's all run on Disguise GX3 Plus and a mixture rendered content and quite a lot of TouchDesigner in the show doing a lot of the camera effects running on the SKY Server and then piped in via render stream. There is some Notch as well, we use a little bit of everything.
LD: How do you pace the visuals so you don’t give away everything at once? There must be some visual gags and playing around with trompe l’oeil since you have four screens to play with?
AY: They sent the set list and it had very clear chapters, with proper interludes, where we knew Joji would leave the stage, for example, so with Cassius we split the show into different chapters and each chapter got its own visual identity. Each time we hit the “interlude” it slightly reset the creative so we could come back in essentially a different world, or a different scene.
LD: When you say he leaves the stage, you mean he's just sort of popped backstage or he's crowd surfing? What is he doing?
AY: I don't know what he does. But there are some very practical things he has to get done in those interludes, particularly with the platform he uses, he has to get harnessed into it etc.
There's the central platform, which is built as a forced perspective and hoisted by six chains so that he can float right to the top of the set and anywhere in between. Luckily, he is unafraid of heights because it goes scarily high with him just sitting with his legs dangling off the front.
At that point we make the visuals shift the center of focus up to match where he is. Everything is emanating from him in the middle on the floating platform. They have really good laser programmers with little laser trusses that would fly in and hide behind the his platform and make these big boxy looks, shooting the lasers around the platform up to the edge of the stage.
When the visuals are busy and the lighting has vertical beams, the chains just completely disappear. We designed the visuals to pull attention away from the hardware so it looks like he is floating on a glowing platform up there.
LD: Were all four of the screens always synchronized in how the content works or did you use them for close-ups? Do you have additional IMAG?
AY: There is additional IMAG that's purely functional doing what IMAG needs to do. But for a few songs we fully integrated the camera feeds into the content on all the four layers.
Most of the time, on the stage, it was purely content-based using all four screens together. The content depending on feel of the song. For just a very small handful of songs, we only use the front screen, which makes him look as though he is floating in the middle of it, suspended in a big black void.
That front LED screen is naturally so bright you cannot focus on what is behind it, your eyes just can't adjust because of how bright the screen at the very front is. So you are looking into a big black hole and he is lit with some spots and sidelights which creates this great visual. He's just floating.
We really wanted to let the audience focus their attention directly on the artist not the IMAG.
LD: What was the most challenging part of it? Other than getting the perspective right?
AY: I think one of the hardest things was that a lot of his songs are very short, so it means the set list is lengthy. I think the first version we had was probably 44 songs. We decided early on that we didn't want to repeat any of the looks because the songs are so varied and so individual.
Just the sheer quantity of ideas required to fill the stage was challenging, but they all have to hold together so that the show looks like one cohesive evening rather than a bunch of random, disparate ideas.
LD: So it’s like Eurovision! Thirty-six different bands and songs but you have to make it look like you're in the same event.
AY: Yeah, kind of like that, and there's a lot of individuals making it but we have to make this look like one person has made the whole thing so it all feels coherent and relevant to the artist.
It was quite a challenge to piece it all together and keep coming up with new perspectives and ways to use all of the screens in a unifying way.
It's very easy for eight people to make a show that looks like eight people have made a show--everyone's got a slightly different take and style. Whereas I think for most of the shows we do, the outcome feels like it belongs to the same universe.
LD: Did you settle on a color palette to help unify it?
AY: This is going to sound stupid because it's on an LED screen, but we felt that the colors shouldn't feel too digital.
We wanted everything to have a slightly muted, slightly muddy quality to it. So if we used an orange, it wasn’t an “in your face orange,” it was a pared back, slightly browner version of orange. We pulled the saturation and brightness of it down compared to, for instance, a big pop show where you would want to use the brightest colors and the most saturation possible.
We leached quite a lot of saturation out of the looks. A big thing with his music, and with everything that he puts out, is it really embraces a homemade, lo-fi quality. Even on his new album, there's a really nice quality about his music. It is produced but it doesn't feel produced. We tried to bring that as much as we could into the content as well. We are embraced noise and grain and that became one of the unifying elements. Everything was a bit noisy and kind of, static-y. There is almost no 3D stuff in the show, but a lot of photos and bits of footage, very composited, very layered. Our goal was nothing too shiny.
LD: He covers a lot of different genres, how do you approach that?
AY: A lot of his songs don’t follow a traditional song structure, there isn’t just a verse and chorus and verse. Some have a constant flowing movement to them and they repeat without the build/drop emotion.
For one song I was coming out of Waterloo Tube station and waiting for someone at the top of the escalator and just watching the steps coming up and going through the grate, through and through and through, and we built an entire song’s content out of a photograph of those escalator steps. (The song is “Attention.”)
The song starts completely flat and then gradually reveals a depth to it. There is constant movement, but the whole space feels like it's shifting as well.
There is also a section with two songs, "Last of a Dying Breed," and "Give Me Love," and it's musically such a gear shift from the rest of the show. The whole place erupts into a nightclub with a really fast, pulsing, beat and they just flow from one into the other. For "Give Me Love" we put together these weird eyeballs layered up into a giant grid and at certain parts of the songs, they all turn to look at him. At other times they are looking around the arena and out into the audience so everyone is under surveillance.
Initially, it was set up so the eyeballs could use the Follow-Me tracking data to stay on him but actually, because of the band location etc, he pretty much stays in the center the whole show so it was slightly redundant. But generally the whole show is time coded because it is necessary to get everything to land together, for example, when the platform rises up the video content around him rises up too so it feels like one big moment rather than two separate elements. And the artist is very disciplined. He understands the choreography.
LD: Is there a future technology in projection design the you think, "Someone needs to come up with this"?
AY: The one thing that I wish existed is probably a real-time version of After Effects. Some of the songs coming out of After Effects were taking between four or five hours per screen, and obviously we had four screens. Just the amount of computers that were needed to constantly be rendering. I had a three PCs and four Mac Studios stacked up in my office constantly rendering.
We went into rehearsals with just over three terabytes of rendered video content for the show before we'd made a single revision.
Just because all the screens were 4K, and there were so many songs, and we were doing a full 10-bit workflow. Traditionally, LED screens and the whole process is done in 8-bit color space, which is millions of colors.
Which is slightly limited especially when you're looking for nice, muddy colors or doing a gradient, for example a blue to black gradient, and you want it to be smooth all the way up and not steps.
Whereas 10-bit color is essentially trillions of colors. So all of those colors that are missing in between on the 8-bit, are available. You have to start out that way though, knowing that it's going to be 10-bit color. The servers and LED tiles and processors have to be set up that way which is more work for everyone, and it makes the file sizes much bigger.
LD: What’s your favorite part of this project?
AY: It's nice to get the opportunity to kind of be bold. Sometimes, of necessity, you need to make a nice background, but here it felt like someone opened the gate and said, "OK, let's see what you can do."
(Scroll for the crew list.)
A video from Nova Live on YouTube gives a taste of the four screens in action during a show in Los Angeles.
Crew List, Solaris Tour - 2026
Creative Direction & Show Design - Cassius Creative and FRAY Studio
Production & Lighting Design - Cassius @CassiusCreative
Video Design - FRAY Studio @fray_studio
Video Design & Creative Producer - Adam Young @mradamyoung
Video Vendor - Fuse
Video Crew Chief - Ed Lawlor
Animation & Video Design
Matt Brown, Norvydas Genys, Letty Fox, Kira O’Brien & Laura Perrett @m.b.rown @norvydasg @foxletty @kiramay_obrien @lauraperrettdesign
Real-time Touch Design - Kira O’Brien & Nicklas Mathews @decayingsun
Skin Walker Design - Nicole Chufi @chufi404
Artwork Concepting - Grace Arnott-Hayes @garnotthayes
Video Programmer - Ed White @edwhite.live
Camera Director - Evan Smith
Studio Producer - Georgia Young @georgiaaaa
Touring Operator and Server tech - Owen Evans
Lighting
Lighting Vendor - Christie Lites
Lighting Crew Chief - Evan McElhiney
Lighting Programmer - Alex Noel @alexnoel.co
Lighting Director - Justus Bradshaw @hanielcreative
Laser Programming - Andrew Turner @andrewturnerlasers
Laser and SFX Operation - Evan Thomas
Lasers and SFX - ER Productions
Tour
Artist Management - Gut Works - Anders Borge, Jared Blashinsky & Ollie Zhang
Tour Management & Direction - Matthias Cobbaut | Lobby Call @lobby.call
Production Manager - George Baker | Noctura Productions @NocturaProductions
Stage Manager - Matthew Roberts
Production Coordinator - Maya Dottin
Production Assistant - Dalal Rajhi
Musical Director - Robbie Brett
Scenic Construction & Staging - All Access Staging
Automation - CyberMotion