How I Made 172 VJ Loops for Beyond Wonderland in Two Weeks
172 loops. Two weeks. A stage resolution of 2808x1040. Here's how that actually worked.
The brief
Lucid Creates came to me for their "Fragments" stage at Beyond Wonderland 2025, a major electronic music festival in the US. The stage concept was called "Through The Looking Glass" and the visual direction was clear from the start: refractive glass worlds, crystalline corridors, abstract tunnels. Cold, cinematic, futuristic. Visuals that feel like you're looking beyond the LED wall into a different dimension.
The brief wasn't just about aesthetic though. Lucid needed a full library of content for a live VJ performance, which means variety, range, and enough material to sustain a full night across multiple artists without repeating. 172 clips across multiple visual themes and variants.
Two weeks to deliver everything.
The approach
The first decision was how to structure the visual system. 172 clips sounds like a lot but they don't all need to be completely different scenes. The more efficient and cohesive approach is to build a smaller number of scenes deeply, then generate variants of each one.
I worked across eight distinct scenes, each one a different environment within the same glass and refraction world: glass pillars, crystalline corridors, refractive tunnels, cave formations with scanning lasers, transparent machines, abstract landscapes. Within each scene I built multiple animation variants covering different moods, intensities, and rhythmic behaviours, so Lucid's VJ could move between them fluidly throughout the night.
Each clip was designed without fixed beat sync. Instead the motion itself carries rhythm through pulse-driven light behaviour and evolving structures that react organically when mixed. This is intentional for live performance: locked beat-sync clips feel mechanical and restrict the VJ. Rhythmically suggestive clips give the performer something to work with.
The pipeline
All animation and rendering were done in Cinema 4D with Octane Render. The glass and refraction work was the most technically demanding part. Physically accurate glass in Octane requires careful management of transmission, IOR, dispersion, and caustics to avoid render times that become completely unworkable at scale.
I built a set of tested, optimised glass materials early in production and applied them consistently across all scenes. Once the look was established, the material work was systematic rather than exploratory, which saved significant time in the back half of the project.
Rendering 172 clips at 2808x1040 locally would have been impossible in the time available. I processed everything through OToy Render Network, Octane's cloud rendering infrastructure. This allowed me to run multiple scenes simultaneously rather than sequentially, which compressed the timeline significantly.
Post-processing was handled in After Effects and DaVinci Resolve. Each clip went through a consistent grade to ensure tonal coherence across the full library, then quality checked against the stage spec before final delivery.
What made it work
Two things: a clear visual system established early, and a render pipeline that matched the scale of the project.
The visual system meant every decision downstream had a reference point. Is this new scene on-brief? Does it fit the glass world? Does it give Lucid's VJ something they don't already have? Having that clarity early removes the creative friction that slows large projects down.
The render pipeline meant the technical constraints didn't become the limiting factor. OToy's network handled the volume. My job was to keep feeding it good material.
The result
172 seamless loops delivered for Lucid Creates' Fragments stage at Beyond Wonderland 2025, performed live across the festival by Lucid's VJ team.
Need a custom visual library for your next stage or tour? That's exactly what the Exclusive Visuals tiers are built for.
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Mihaly Sipos is a London-based motion designer and visual artist. He has created live stage visuals for Creamfields, Beyond Wonderland, Galantis, Chase and Status, and Sub Focus.
