︎Promo graphic design / Stage video edit and graphics / tittle design
Video for the launch of the Album.
Francesco Tristano
TOKYO STORIES
In this visual adventure with Luxembourg-born pianist Francesco Tristano and Falcon Muse Creative, we were asked to create a visual atmosphere to be used along the live performances of Francesco’s Tokyo Stories album tour, released by Sony Classical.
For the videos we were instructed to use photographs from Japanese artist Ryuya Amao which were astonishing, a Black and White poem to Tokyo, and from there we started to mix them and animate them following the album’s rythmical guidance.
Following Falcon Muse Creative’s direction, we started to mix and edit them following the visual guidelines of 12 tatamis (a sort of geometrical proportion derivative from a type of mat used as a flooring material in traditional Japanese-style rooms). From this proportion we came up with the idea of using the screen to light up some parts of the stage and enable us to change and create atmospheres evolving and changing during the whole show. The result was a visual language that worked perfectly as a combination to the live piano performance from Francesco.
After we had the tour visuals ready, La Murga Visual was asked to create all of the graphic design that was involved in the titles design and promotional artworks for the entire tour. This are a few of them.
“Tokyo Stories is not an exploration of Japanese music, but a way of capturing the essence of Japan through music; not necessarily about harmonies but about the poetry of sound. In many of the pieces on the record, such as Lazaro or Nogizaka, it’s Tokyo’s own sounds which weave around the piano melodies, excerpted from field recordings made in restaurants, streets, subway stations and silent nighttime walks. In the instances where there are Japanese-sounding chords, like in Yoyogi Reset, Tristano’s intention is to find the place where musical traditions meet; just like, more than a century ago, Claude Debussy found inspiration in Asian music to find new harmonies with which to meet the end of the romantic period.“
“By means of a dialogue between traditions and artists, Tokyo Stories feels like an album suspended in space, making subtle quantic leaps through undefined moments in time. The collaborations with Guti and Hiroshi Watanabe take tracks like Insomnia and Bokeh Tomorrow to the realm of expansive techno, whilst the clarinet of French soloist Michael Portal helps bridge the gap between European jazz and what could be the soundtrack of a François Truffaut movie. Meanwhile, Electric Mirror turns a dance piece by baroque master Jean-Philippe Rameau into a metaphor for the feeling of vertigo one can have in Tokyo’s hectic mornings and rush hours; its velocity and its crowded spaces.”
Taken from Francesco Tristano official webpage.
Here’s a little taste of how the show was seen on Barcelona’s L’auditori, a beautiful venue with the largest screen of the whole tour, the experience was mezmerising.
This are some artworks for the Tokyo Stories tour, done using the same treatment we use for the creation of the videos which created this frozen in time stylish look on social media.
The only moment the colors shifted on the show was at the end, where we used this red circle deformed by a tatami as a reference to Japan’s flag circle.
The post for social media for the show on Tokyo, when the album returned to the city that ispired it.
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