GALANTIS 2025 Midsommer — Live Visuals
Intro A vibrant, euphoric celebration of summer. These visuals were created for Galantis' 2025 Midsommer live show in New York, designed to capture the playful, joyous spirit of the festival season. The creative direction called for lush flowers, floating pills, and balloons — all signature elements in Galantis' visual universe.
Concept & Direction The goal was not to tell a deep conceptual story but to amplify summer joy and playfulness on stage. The motifs (flowers, pills, and balloons) were driven by the creative direction received directly from the artist and team. The flowers highlight the artist's love for summer blooms, while the pills are a recurring visual element connected to the artist’s ADHD theme. The balloons were a major campaign element, featuring playful graphics and floating motion.
Design & Technical Process The models for the flowers and pills were provided. I set them up using simple MoGraph and effectors inside Cinema 4D to achieve natural yet dynamic arrangements.
The balloons presented a technical challenge — they were delivered as extremely high-poly meshes, unsuitable for simulation. To overcome this, I created optimized low-poly versions and baked the high-poly detail maps using Substance Painter. Once optimized, the balloons were animated using Cinema 4D’s soft body dynamics to achieve realistic floating and drifting motions.
Lighting was set up using a mix of sun light and area lights. I created light pass AOVs in Octane, which allowed me to generate subtle variations in the longer loops without re-rendering entire scenes.
All renders were done in Octane using adaptive sampling and denoising for cleaner, faster outputs. The post-processing was minimal, focusing primarily on light pass mixing to finalize looks.
Stage Integration These visuals were designed as complementary frames and full-screen fills. While the main show animations did not always cover the entire stage, these loops and frames helped complete the immersive stage design. There was no direct coordination with VJs or operators — my role focused purely on animation delivery.
The LED wall was massive, measuring 23 meters wide by 5.5 meters tall, at a resolution of 5888 × 1408 px. This large canvas demanded high-resolution assets and careful attention to detail to ensure clarity and impact on stage.
Outcome Although I didn’t receive direct feedback from Galantis, the show was a great success, and the visuals contributed to an energetic, memorable summer experience for the audience.
Credits & Tools
Concept direction and production: ZEAL
3D & animation: Cinema 4D, Octane Render
Texturing & baking: Substance Painter
Tags #Galantis #Midsommer #LiveVisuals #StageDesign #MotionGraphics #Cinema4D #OctaneRender #FestivalVisuals #3DAnimation #EventDesign
