Eight is Enough

In our July 2006 issue, after the Daft Punk starship touched down at Coachella, we looked into the VFX behind the group's astonishing stage show. The boys are on tour again, with the same rig, so read all about Eight's efforts.

To transform an ordinary concert into an epiphany you need many elements, a few of which are intangible. Santa Monica's Eight VFX mustered the pixie dust in its creation of special motion graphics to help transform Daft Punk's appearance at the Coachella Valley Music Festival in Indio, Calif., from magnificent to transcendental. The French duo, making their first stateside appearance in eight years, worked with Eight to craft video elements coursing through a tripartite stage.
While Daft Punk (humans Thomas Bangalter & Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo after all) performed in a pyramid composed of LEDs, they were framed by neon tubes that conveyed video, and a curtain carrying additional messages. Eight's primary responsibilities were the motion graphics that began pumping through the pyramid one third of the way into the show, which, along with Daft Punk's robotic house music, were compelling enough to break the strictest rule at Coachella and go half an hour past the midnight curfew.
"We basically created a 3-D map of the pyramid," says Baptiste Andrieux, executive producer and founding partner at Eight. "We had to find a way to create images that would interact best with the pyramid." In the week leading up to the concert, Eight's team rehearsed the show with Daft Punk while noting what the group—directors themselves, first of their videos and now a feature-length film, Electroma—liked and disliked. "The pyramid was pure video moving," says Andrieux. "You forgot completely you were looking at a concert, you were just in this 3-D space. Movement of the video on the pyramid not only simulated the object's motion , it also appeared to be throwing lines and light out into the frenzied crowd. "Everybody was really amazed, it was the first time we could really feel the reaction from the audience," Andrieux says. "It was amazing for us—even knowing what I was going to see, I was just blown away.