Camera As Content

A Practical Problem

Some of my earliest jobs in live music were rigging fast-fold projection screens. Two of them, one either side of the stage, angled out toward the audience so the people at the back of the arena could actually see the artist. A camera feed. A mixer. A projector. A screen. Job done.

That was iMag. Image magnification. A practical solution to a practical problem.

Those screens became LED panels. The panels got bigger, brighter, more reliable. But for a long time the underlying logic stayed the same: the camera director makes their version of the show over to the side, and the video designer makes theirs in the centre. Two parallel languages, running alongside each other without much conversation between them.

Out of the Wings

Now something has shifted. Across the touring and arena work we do at FRAY, live camera is moving out of the wings and into the heart of the show. Not just magnifying the artist, but becoming the raw material from which the entire visual world is built. Camera as content. And it changes almost everything about how a show is designed.

The Spectrum

On the Zayn 2026 World Tour, the starting point for nearly every song was the camera. The show is intimate in its ambition, close and personal but at arena scale, so the question we kept asking was: how do we frame Zayn in a way that feels unique to this song, this moment? Sometimes the answer was relatively simple, a beautiful haloing treatment, cameras mirrored either side of the stage, the edit moving gradually from one camera to two to three as the song opens up. For a song like Alienated, that graceful layering becomes the visual language of the track. It feels like watching an edit, but one that breathes.

Then there are songs like Breathe, which push the idea somewhere else entirely. The entire screen is a grid, populated by coloured squares and two live camera inputs that scroll, loop, twist, recolour, and recompose entirely on the beat. It looks like an animated graphic. But every texture in it comes from the live camera. Every frame is generated in real time in Notch. The artist is alive inside the content, not placed in front of it. That distinction matters.

The Pierce the Veil Tour, which went out last year, showed a very different face of the same idea. The band didn't want conventional content. So we brought the live camera onstage and made the band, and sometimes the audience, the content itself. We treated that camera in a way that sat with the visual identity of their latest album campaign: true halftone applied to the live feed, a tight colour palette, grunge, noise. The energy of the band playing carries straight through the camera, the show moving between graphic collage and bold, screen-filling close-ups. That unpredictability is one of the most exciting things about this approach. A show built around live camera can never be exactly the same twice.

The same instinct, to hero live camera on the surfaces behind the artist, drove Olivia Dean's The Art of Loving Tour, though we pushed it in the opposite direction. Here the projection surface was the iMag. There were no side screens at all. Everything kept the audience's attention at the centre of the room, where you watch Olivia move around the stage and the band take their solos, live and magnified behind them at once. This one asked for restraint rather than transformation: a cinematic feel, subtle colour correction, careful grading. It was about showing the artist in a beautifully curated way and letting the audience connect with what was actually happening onstage, not turning the camera feed into content. Not every show wants the camera fractured. Sometimes the strongest choice is to leave it clean.

The Joji Solaris Tour, which we finished recently, sits somewhere between those two poles. Here we put cameras on the main stage to work as both iMag and content, and let the balance move as the show travelled through its chapters. In the first chapter I wanted the audience's eyes on the stage and nowhere else, so the camera folded as cleanly as possible into the content, doing the job of iMag from within the world rather than off to the side. After that we opened up. Traditional side screens took over the iMag role, which freed the onstage camera to become something stranger.

Working in TouchDesigner, we built a look we called generative modulation, where lines are distorted by the highlights of an image. The image, of course, was the live camera, and Joji emerged out of it as something digital and abstract. Elsewhere we leaned on feedback, in two flavours. One sampled the edge of the input and repeated it across the surfaces, which hit hard and read cleanly. The other stretched that edge across the surface into something soft and fluid. Same signal, different worlds.

The third chapter split the stage into an underworld and an overworld. The automated platform Joji usually stands on rotated up to become a roof, a horizon line dividing the two. For Blah Blah Blah the camera lived only in the overworld, pulled into a glitching digital space. Then, moving into Like You Do, the underworld softened from that hard digital world into fluid particles, and the camera was heroed through the choruses, revealed high on the LED wall and dissolving into the particles below.

Signal as Material

What tools like Notch and TouchDesigner allow us to do is take a live signal and treat it as a building block rather than a finished image. You can blend it with rendered content, layer it with real-time graphics, multiply and fracture it across a surface until what you're watching sits somewhere between a music video and something entirely live. I hesitate to use the music video comparison, because what we're making is categorically different, but there's something in the language that overlaps. A music video frames an artist within a cinematic world. What we're doing is framing them within a live world, one that can only exist in the room, on that night, with that performance driving it.

There's also a collaboration that opens up here that I find genuinely interesting. When iMag lives on the side screens, the camera director and the video designer are making separate things. The moment you bring the camera director's work directly into the visual composition, you have to start talking. How shots are framed, when to push wide, when to hold tight, whether a particular song suits an ensemble feel or should stay close on the artist: these become shared decisions. Some songs need a fast, live edit. Others need something much stiller. Getting that right requires trust in both directions, and when it works, the camera director becomes another creative voice in the room rather than a separate operation happening alongside the show.

The Laufey Matter of Time Tour offered a different version of this again. There are side screens for traditional iMag, but for a large number of songs we bring the camera into carefully built portals within the conceptual world we've created for the artist. The camera isn't heavily treated here. But it is set within a frame that places the artist inside something, a world built specifically for her. The effect is of an artist who inhabits her visual environment rather than standing in front of it.

The Artist at the Centre

That's increasingly how I think about the design of a show now. Not: what content are we making? But: how does the artist's physical presence connect to everything else on screen, and how do we make those two things behave as one?

The distance between a fast-fold screen at the side of an arena and a live camera signal being recomposed in real time at the centre of a show is enormous. But it happened gradually, through incremental advances in technology and a growing appetite among designers and directors to push what the tool can actually do.

What strikes me more is that live camera has always been part of the live music experience. The person at the back of the arena has always needed to see the artist. Without that there is no connection. That need hasn't changed. What changed is what we understood it to mean.

For a long time, iMag was exactly what the name suggested: a practical answer to a practical problem. Make the artist bigger. Put them on a screen. Connect them with their fans. Done. What we're finding now is that the same tool, the same camera, the same signal, contains something we hadn't fully unlocked. The artist's live presence isn't just information to be transmitted. It's material to be worked with.

We haven't invented something new, however, a new way of thinking about real-time technology has allowed us to find a more compelling language for something we've been doing all along. That's what excites me about where this is heading.

Because the reason for that excitement matters. What we're describing is technology in service of creativity, not the other way around. That's how it should always be. Without a strong idea at the centre, technology becomes a gimmick. It impresses briefly and then it disappears, leaving nothing behind. What keeps the camera at the heart of this work is not the sophistication of the tools. It's the desire to put the artist in front of their audience in a way that feels alive, connected, and true.