AVENGED
SEVENFOLD

680A4799-Enhanced-NR_McKenna Branson-min.jpg

Avenged Sevenfold asked us to create a visual experience inspired and guided by absurdism and the search for meaning in life. The band wanted elements of surprise, intrigue, and even playful confusion to be a part of the visual experience, along with frequent reference to the amazing artworks of their friend and collaborator, Wes Lang.

“The production A7X has on display for this album cycle is some of the most awe-inspiring visuals of any rock show right now, and it’s easily the best of the band’s career.”

— FORBES

Mattel was inspired by Matt's story of strolling amongst the houses in Hollywood and being struck by the fakery and the darkness disguised inside these perfect places. To reflect this, we built an absurd plastic home to burn down, along with dolls inside it to melt. Inspirations were taken from the classic Soundgarden "Black Hole Sun" video, movies like Drop Dead Fred, The Stepford Wives and even kids' TV like Pee-wee's Playhouse. An uncanny valley of the American dream, gone to hell.

“Nearly every song had it’s own intricately tailored immersive stage design and video elements to go along with it. Every video wall including the stage floor (which also acted as a massive video panel) was filled with choreographed lighting and visuals, so much so that you could feel a stronger sense of intent behind A7X’s setlist for this album cycle”

— FORBES

The unique stage design and its mix of production elements enabled us to reveal, hide, move and combine surfaces to create visual scenes that could engulf the band in a plastic suburban firestorm in one song or suspend them in the spacey black of ego death of another.

Incorporating the moving screen elements into the show and using them as visual devices was an awesome challenge. This was best shown in the song "A Little Piece of Heaven", where the moving walls reveal and close scenes, physically separating and reuniting the characters. During Mattel, the burning building is pulled apart to reveal its plastic inhabitants before they, too, are engulfed in fire. The screens are then brought back together to extinguish the fire.

A brief that required us to maintain surprise and subvert expectations meant we had to use various tools across the project. Recent advances in cloth sim tech allowed us to pull off a look for Hail To The King that previously we would have approached very differently. AI upscaling and restoration techniques were instrumental in repairing and preparing archival footage of their late drummer, Jimmy Sullivan, which helped do him justice on the big screen. Juxtaposed with this, we used vintage analogue tech to degrade and stylise the visuals featured in Unholy Confessions, giving them a twisted CRT aesthetic yet leveraging modern pixel-sorting techniques.

Keeping the band visible and creatively integrated into the show was incredibly important, and as such, Notch was used ubiquitously. The AI background removal tool in Notch was integral to our creative use of cameras and enabled us to maintain negative space and visual clarity. In "Nightmare", Notch smoke effects are driven in real-time by the artist's movement and then layered into pre-rendered scenes of a smoke-filled forest surrounded by swirling nightmarish characters. During "The Stage", the band is placed into the background as black silhouetted cut-outs, using AI background removal to integrate them as real-time performers in their shadow puppet show. Notch even enables us to burn the entire band alive each night in the final scenes of Mattel!