How Warm & Fuzzy Helped Take Coachella 2022 to Another Dimension

Great music takes you to places you’ve never imagined before. Great music festivals, then, harness that feeling and amplify it across days of melodic entertainment and enthralling experiences. Communicating that unique message through advertising is rarely a simple feat - which is why Coachella, alongside director Ari Fararooy, reached out to Warm & Fuzzy co-founder (and their longtime collaborator) John Bashyam to help make it happen in 2022. 

Leading a team of four VFX artists John leaned into the fantastical and surreal, taking iconic Coachella landmarks and quite literally transforming them through the magic of CG. The result was a set of campaigns which accentuated those fantastical qualities and spoke to the wistful experience of enjoying a weekend (or, as John puts it, weekends) at the festival. 

Of course, the Coachella took on an extra edge of poignancy this year as the festival returned for the first time since the pandemic. In fact, the team’s work on this campaign began in 2019 before lockdown-induced delays put the project on ice. 

To talk through how the campaign happened, and what it meant to be a part of such a celebrated event as it returned post-pandemic, LBB’s Adam Bennett spoke to John. 

Above: John’s other-worldly VFX was put to use in videos both before and after the event was held this year. 

LBB> Hi, John - what were your goals and expectations heading into the project, and to what extent do the finished films align with them? 

John> Our goal was to bring high quality CGI - at scale - to the festival world. We dabbled in it a few years ago by creating two surreal pieces involving the ferris wheel bending, and art pieces floating. These became some of the most-viewed pieces Coachella ever posted, so we knew that we had something there before going into this project. Ari wanted to construct a whole narrative around those concepts and we did exactly that. I might be biased, but I think we made the highest-production value festival video, with the most CG/VFX shots ever!

LBB> Can you tell us how the decisions were made about which landmarks to manipulate with VFX? I found the wobbling ferris wheel kind of hypnotic… 

John> Well, every year Coachella commissions a number of gigantic art pieces that populate the festival grounds. It was Ari’s ultimate goal to show the festival literally coming to life, as if the art pieces and stages could assemble themselves with no human intervention. And then in the ‘rules’ for this universe, all of the human stuff comes in later. 

So any solid pieces that make up the foundation of the festival such as the art, stages, ferris wheel, tents, fences, etc, would need to be animated and brought to life with VFX. It was fun playing off of the various looks of each piece, and making the animation unique to the art.

LBB> In the recap film, we really get a sense of release, joy, and people coming together again at Coachella after a two-year pandemic-related hiatus. Did that message play into the brief you were given at all? 

John> We actually started this project prior to the pandemic, and were in the middle of pre-production when it got postponed. Funnily enough, it was the first real signal to us that things were getting serious. I think the sense of release was always one of Ari’s goals for the video - and obviously fundamental to Coachella’s brand - which just so happened to coincide and be exacerbated by the long-awaited return from covid.

LBB> This campaign represents the latest instance of your working with Coachella, with your relationship stretching back to 2014. Does such an intimate knowledge of the client give you an advantage when working on these projects? 

John> It certainly helps to have the level of familiarity and knowledge of their brand, not to mention just knowing my way around the festival physically! I started back in 2014 supervising VFX on their Desert Parallax recap video, whilst I was still in college. Through the years we’ve strived to constantly one-up the visual effects and evolve the techniques. It was a few years ago that we introduced CGI to the mix, which had never really been done in such a short timeframe. I think this year’s video is a culmination of nearly a decade of exploration in that realm, not to mention the technology evolving to even allow this as a possibility.

LBB> And what is it about these VFX-inspired ads that appeals to Coachella as a brand, do you think? Why is it something they choose to tap into for their communications? 

John> I think the addition of VFX primarily serves to create that mystical surreal world that very much coincides with the feeling you get while at Coachella. It’s a fantasy land where you can go to escape for the weekend (or weekends!). And that sort of thing just can’t be achieved without adding the impossible. It also instantly captivates an audience, which helps things stand out amongst the sea of social media content which can often feel generic and tired.

LBB> I understand that you had people on-the-ground turning around VFX-heavy shots in pretty much real-time for the recap film. How did that work, in practice?

John> Yes, we had a team of four VFX artists (including myself) on site, in a little shipping container office backstage. Three of us were dedicated to the CGI shots, and one was solely focused on the ‘enlargement’ effects. The director was also hopping back and forth helping out with shots here and there. And this small team completed over 40 VFX shots!

There were a number of things that made all of this insanity possible.

First of all we prepped all of the assets beforehand. We spent two months before the festival creating CG models of all the art pieces, and animating a number of shots. So by the time we got on-site we had everything ready to go and could easily (well, relatively easily) pop things into new shots as they were being filmed. 

Second is that we had a really fast internet connection. This allowed us to log remotely into workstations at our LA office, and utilise our full render farm. Essentially we were working in LA, but sitting in Indio. So instead of only having the computers that we brought, we had 10+ extra render nodes at our disposal. This made rendering much faster, and allowed same-day turnaround for shots that would normally take days to render.

Third is that we had a really close collaboration between all team members. Our whole team was sitting next to each other. The director, our VFX team, the DP, AC, and coordinator were all right there with instant communication. On top of that, Ari was also editing and giving us approved plates for VFX very quickly. The feedback loop was short and efficient, especially since Coachella themselves rarely intervened.

So in a not-so-short way of explaining, all of that was necessary to make this video possible. It was essentially the work of a commercial or TV episode, done in one week on-location.

Above: Warm & Fuzzy team breaks down the visual effects utilised in the campaign.

LBB> Aside from that, what was the most challenging aspect of this project and how did you overcome it? 

John> Without a doubt it was the speed at which things needed to be turned around, whilst still maintaining quality. And just balancing the trio of amount of shots, vs time, vs quality. There were always more things we wanted to add, but ultimately we had to be realistic about finishing on time. 

LBB> And would you do anything differently if you had your time again? 

John> Honestly, I’m not sure if there would be much else that we could have done differently! I think we were fairly well-prepared given the schedule and budget parameters. It was certainly challenging, but we approached it with clear organisation and a solid plan which we delivered on.

LBB> Finally, imagine that you’ve been placed in charge of bookings for next year’s festival, and that every artist in the world is available. Who are your headliners, and why? 

John> It’s got to be Viagra Boys. Firstly because I love them, and secondly because it would be hilarious to have a punk band that was pouring beer on themselves in the Sonora tent headline the whole festival.