Highlights
creamfields
2024
178 geometric and abstract VJ loops created for Highlights Festival 2024, part of Creamfields London. Produced in collaboration with Lucid Creates and Matt King, the project required content built specifically for one of the most architecturally distinctive LED installations in the UK festival circuit, a brutalist outdoor stage with LED strips running across a network of concrete ceiling beams at 10140x1300 resolution.
The Brief
Highlights is an annual electronic music festival held every June as part of Creamfields London. The stage design is defined by its architecture: a covered outdoor space with brutal concrete beams overhead, LED strips integrated directly into the structure rather than mounted on a conventional screen or backdrop. The result is an installation where the content has to work with the physical space, not against it.
Lucid Creates needed a full library of VJ content built for this format. The creative direction was geometric and abstract, kept strictly in black and white. This was both a deliberate aesthetic choice and a practical one: monochrome content maps cleanly onto the LED structure without competing with stage lighting, and black and white loops can be recoloured in real time by the VJ using blend modes and colour correction, making the library far more versatile across a full night of different artists and moods.
The Work
178 clips were produced across a range of geometric and abstract themes. The content was created in Cinema 4D using the native render engine and X-Particles, with post-processing in After Effects.
Visual themes across the library included wireframe geometric forms, corridor and tunnel perspectives, particle fields, typographic grid systems, glitch-influenced architectural fragments, waveform structures, tessellated tile patterns, and abstract light diffusion sequences. Each theme was developed into multiple animation variants covering different intensities and rhythmic behaviours, giving Lucid's VJ team a deep library to draw from across a full festival day.
The template format: 10140x1300 across five addressable colour zones, required careful composition planning. Content had to read coherently across the full ultra-wide span while also working when zones were triggered independently. Every clip was built and checked against the template before delivery.
Tools: Cinema 4D, Native Render, X-Particles, After Effects Collaboration: Lucid Creates, Matt King Client: Highlights Festival, Creamfields London Resolution: 10140x1300 Clips delivered: 178 Year: 2024
The Result
178 seamless VJ loops performed live at Highlights Festival 2024, part of Creamfields London — one of the UK's largest annual electronic music events.
The black and white visual system proved flexible across the full night, with Lucid's VJ team able to recolour and blend content in real time to match the energy and palette of each artist's set.
The Result
178 seamless VJ loops performed live at Highlights Festival 2024, part of Creamfields London — one of the UK's largest annual electronic music events.
The black and white visual system proved flexible across the full night, with Lucid's VJ team able to recolour and blend content in real time to match the energy and palette of each artist's set.
Need a custom VJ content library built for your stage or installation?