After releasing album “Brave New World” to critical acclaim, artist Amanda Cook set out to bring the themes and ideas from the album to life.

From the outset and initial meetings with Amanda, it was clear that there was a very strong vision for what she wanted this live experience to be: an invitation to go on a sonic and visual journey into a brave new world where common beliefs and misconceptions of God are challenged in beautiful and thoughtful ways.

Early Development

There was a desire to utilize projection in interesting ways and also to play off of the art direction from the album itself which utilized a ‘double exposure’ aesthetic. We approached the design by thinking about the place the songs where coming from, a place of authenticity, freedom, creativity. Building on this, we found inspiration in the concept of an intimate artist's studio surrounded by a series of large windows. We wanted to create these ‘windows’ as a custom structure that could function as both a light source that illuminated the artist and a projection surface providing a view into a Brave New World. 

Design

From initial sketches, we worked through how this concept would come to life in a theatre environment and all of the technical realities of how to accomplish something compelling that could travel/tour well. Through the process we came to a place that we felt was a good solution and that Amanda loved as well. 

A challenge that became clear as we went on was that some of the venues had changed, and because of this our design was unable to actually fit inside over half of the venues on the first leg of the tour. This required us to go back to the drawing board and revise and streamline our design to become something that would work in all venues, being able to be scaled up or down accordingly. This shifted the design from 3 tall screens to 1 solid surface that served as more of a traditional canvas. 

We also thoroughly enjoyed the process of creating all of the visual content for the tour: custom film content, heavily treated IMAG, in-camera double exposure, stop motion animated graphics and more.

Results

The Brave New World Tour marked the first solo artist tour from Bethel Music. With passionate crowds and full venues each night, the audience response was beyond what anyone could have hoped for.