Bryson Tiller's 61-date Neo Trapsoul world tour is designed to accommodate venues from Red Rocks to Berlin's Velodrom, and a variety of guest artists emerging from a FOMO-inspiring door to backstage. Cort Lawrence, show designer and director at Raw Cereal, spoke to Live Design about its work on the tour. Raw Cereal handled the full creative production: creative direction, show direction, stage design, lighting design, video content, programming direction and show producing and Lawrence calls working with an artist who cares about the story, "a dream."
Cort Lawrence and Anders Rahm, founders of Raw Cereal (part of Hovercraft Ventures) are presenting a panel about their work at LDI 2026: XLIVE: The Concert Touring Sessions.
Live Design: What attracted you to working on this project and what was the scope of work?
Cort Lawrence: This is our first time working with Bryson, and it came through tour director Emily May Ockenden and Verve Productions. Emily brought us in, and that relationship set the tone for everything that followed. What drew us to the project was the moment. This is Bryson's first big tour in about a decade, since the original Trapsoul Tour, and it really is a comeback. He came in with a clear point of view and wanted a world built around him, not a stage dressed up around him. For our team, that's the dream: an artist who cares about the story as much as we do.
We handled the full creative production: creative direction, show direction, stage design, lighting design, video content, programming direction and show producing. All of the screen content was made in-house by our team, and the lighting design was ours too, so video, lighting, lasers and effects grew up together as one show instead of being handed between departments. None of it happens without the people around us. We worked very closely with tour director Emily May Ockenden, and her collaboration and drive with her production team allowed us to create this beautiful show.
We treated him like the main character in his own game world" — Cort Lawrence
LD: What was the starting off point for this design—did Tiller have references for you to work with?
CL: Bryson came in with words more than pictures: cool, metallic, robotic, reflective, illuminated, back lit. His tone was "Tron-esque, but more Dune." His biggest note was to pull back from scenic builds and focus on three things: a monolith, video and lasers. He wanted to feel small on stage against something massive, a "last man on earth," "man vs god" kind of feeling. That became our concept, Last Man On Earth, with the tagline Find Your Tribe. He's also a huge gamer who loves Atari and Nintendo, so we treated him like the main character in his own game world.
LD: Can you walk us though the design process?
CL: We worked from Bryson's own show score rather than waiting on album releases. He mapped out the whole set himself: the medleys, the AI voice interludes and the dance breaks for his three dancers, with no start and stop between songs. That score was our blueprint from day one, and we laid every look on top of it.
The design you see on tour is roughly version 10. Early versions had levels and moving pieces, and with every round we stripped something away until the monolith, the video and the lasers were doing all the work. Bryson is very visual, so we sent him renders and fly-throughs almost daily, and he was a true creative partner in every look. Moments like the laser cone in "Sorrows," where Bryson and one of the dancers stand inside the cone, came out of that back and forth. The content kept evolving through rehearsals in Las Vegas and Salt Lake City, and he's still tweaking things on the road.
The stage is two video towers that read as monoliths. Each one is 32 feet tall and 20 feet by 20 feet, so next to a 6-foot artist the scale says everything. Each tower has a solid LED top and bottom with a transparent blow-through band in the middle. With content running they look solid, but light and fog push straight through that band. We built the content with forced perspective so the towers read like buildings, and at points they seem to break apart into floating cubes. There's no automation; all of that movement is content.
The cube faces are ROE Visual CB5 half panels, 356 in total, and the blow-through bands are ROE CB8 Transparent, 76 panels, running on Brompton Technology SX40 processing with Tessera XD distribution. Screenworks NEP supplied the screens, and SGPS ShowRig built the custom corners for the video wall. Tall video strips in the middle and at the back give the vertical lighting a place to land. IMAG lives on the towers themselves, across their full height or held to the cubes, plus side screens in the arenas and at Red Rocks.
LD: Why did you choose the ROE Visual screens versus?
CL: The whole idea depended on mixing a solid product with a transparent one in the same structure: CB5, a single band of CB8 Transparent, then CB5 again. Not many productions blend two pixel pitches like that, and Screenworks really backed us on it, helping align the panels so color flows cleanly across both. With the right content the transparent band disappears, and lasers, lighting and fog come straight through it. That layering is what makes the towers feel like real objects in a real world instead of flat video walls.
LD: At one moment the screens show the artist kicking up earth, how did you create this effect?
CL: We use a high gloss black Marley floor, and the earth content lives on the towers. Low-lying fog from two Cloud 9 units on the deck carries the look down to stage level, so it reads like Bryson is kicking it up as he walks. It's a good example of how we like to work: let the layers do the storytelling.
LD: There is a lot of interaction with the content (I’m thinking of the cartoon version of the artist dancing) is this timecoded or someone is busking it front of house?
LC: That moment is live. It's IMAG from the show cameras with a Notch effect applied in real time, so the cartoon is Bryson himself, dancing live, and it follows every move he makes. The rest of the show runs on timecode from the audio desk. Lighting, video, lasers and flames all chase the same clock, standardized across every act on the bill, which is what lets the content land with Bryson and the dancers night after night. Conner Hill runs video at FOH with a Screenworks DVS G1 as primary and his own Resolume and Notch rig in parallel as backup.
LD: The design creates an entrance upstage with glimpses of lighting and smoke breaking through that conveys the impression that there is some amazing party or event happening through the gap—how did this come about and how did the lighting designer feel about it?
CL: One of Bryson's earliest references was a glowing door upstage center, and it never left the design. The gap between the towers became that door, and featured artists enter and exit through it too, so every entrance feels like someone stepping out of that world. Bryson loves being back lit and seen in silhouette, so lighting through the gap was an easy sell. VL3600s and GLP JDC1s backlight from above, the rear lasers terminate in the roof of the venue, and haze and fog carry all of it out to the audience. Since the lighting design was ours from the start, there was nobody to persuade. It was always part of the world we were building.
LD: What was the most challenging part of this design?
CL: Scale was the first challenge. The routing mixes amphitheaters like Red Rocks with arenas like Madison Square Garden and UBS Arena, and the show had to feel big in every room without being scaled down. We kept it lean: the towers carry video and lighting at once, which keeps the truck pack tight, and the downstage truss stays small, two VL3600s and the lasers, to keep amphitheater sightlines clear. The biggest crunch was the rehearsal timeline. A lot of the content and programming came together in Las Vegas and Salt Lake City, so we leaned on our Unreal Engine previs to program before the rig was even up, put in long nights, and pushed through as one team with Emily and her production team.
LD: How did you build in flexibility to the design to accommodate guest artists/set list changes?
CL: The core show is timecoded, but featured-artist moments are busked on the night. Our lighting and video operators know the show's world well enough to build those songs live, so a new artist or a different version of a song still feels like part of the same story.
LD: Are you using any new gear?
CL: Everything in the North American rig is gear we've used before. What was new for us, and for Screenworks, was the CB5 and CB8 Transparent blend. We were skeptical about the CB5 and CB8 blend until we saw it work in person. The new fixtures come in Europe, where PRG is bringing in the Ayrton Eagle Strike in place of the VL3600, the GLP X5 MAXX in place of the Ayrton Magic Panel FX, and the Chauvet Ovation Cyc 3 in place of the Martin VDO Fatron 20. We're excited to get the Eagle Strike and X5 MAXX into the show.
LD: What is your favorite part of the design?
CL: The opening. We give the audience a big, energetic intro across the whole screen, then strip it right back for the first song so all the focus lands on Bryson. From there the show moves into the starry night world, which has become the audience favorite. And seeing it all come together under the sky at Red Rocks, with the audience singing every word, is a moment our whole team will remember. More than anything, we hope people feel like they watched a cinematic movie, a world built for Bryson, rather than a concert full of glitz.