Laufey

FRAY Studio designed the theatrical tour visuals for Laufey's A Matter of Time Tour, her first worldwide arena tour. Our work covered 2D and 3D animation and live camera grading for the performance, building a screen language that could carry a full arena show while staying true to the intimacy and craft of Laufey's music.

The production was broken into five distinct theatrical acts, weaving a single journey through the night and into dawn. Every song built on the one before it to create an abstract, linear narrative rarely seen on an arena tour, where shows are more often a run of standalone moments. Each act opens with an animation that sets the tone for the music to follow, holding a mood across four to five songs and moving through Laufey's expansive catalogue, from soft and romantic, to sultry and jazzy, to dark and brooding.

Working closely with Laufey's Creative Director, Junia Lin, we spent significant design time world building: defining the rules that would let Laufey's new universe stand up to an audience across a full arena. Often we looked to create a sense of theatrical space that linked directly to the physical set designed by Stufish, so the screens and the stage read as one environment. From there we would abstract that world, adding elements that should not be there, or moving the set into a completely different place.

By always subverting a location into something magical or other-worldly, we kept the tone of the show consistent while giving each act its own identity. That approach gave us floating glass castles, impossible endless corridors, and liminal Icelandic landscapes: spaces that felt grounded enough to believe in, yet strange enough to belong entirely to Laufey's world rather than our own.

Building a world this vast let us reward fans with layers of detail. We threaded easter eggs, recurring themes and connections to Laufey's wider world throughout the visuals, so that the audience could keep discovering new meaning across the night. Because these references grew out of the world itself, they never felt forced or false, which would have broken the magic the show depends on.

We used a mixture of 2D and 3D animation techniques, then processed the imagery so it felt found somewhere in the recent past, as though each frame could be one of Laufey's own memories. That treatment created a strong and cohesive atmosphere of whimsy and fairy tale, with just a little darkness underneath, matching the emotional range of the music itself.

The result was a fully realised world that grew with every act and gave Laufey's first worldwide arena tour a visual identity as distinctive as her sound. In the words of Laufey herself, "You made my dreams come true."