Poolbar Festival
Poolbar
Festival
- The Challenge
As a student team, we were asked to develop visuals for Poolbar, a summer culture festival in Feldkirch, Austria. The challenge was to create a visual concept that could work across different concerts, moods and performances, while also responding to the festival’s architecture through projection mapping.
- The Solution
The final result was a collection of live visuals that could be mixed and adapted to different musical performances. By combining footage from industrial spaces, natural environments and experimental close-ups with projection mapping, we turned the festival architecture into an active part of the concerts. The visuals were not fixed videos, but a flexible system that could react to each performance in real time.
- The Process
During our second semester, we worked as a student team on the visual programme for the Poolbar Festival in Feldkirch. Before the festival, we built a broad library of visual material by filming in different environments, including the Campus Väre, an old textile factory in Dornbirn, as well as natural surroundings. Through experiments with moving cameras, turntables, light, textures and close-up details such as moss and branches, we created specific visual sequences as well as flexible B-roll material. We also created 3D Gaussian Splatting models of natural objects and used an Azure Kinect depth camera to make parts of the visuals motion-reactive.
- The Performance
We edited the footage into short clips and prepared it for live use. We then spent a full weekend at the festival, presenting and mixing our pre-produced visuals live during different concerts. We selected, layered and adapted the clips in real time to the music, the artists and the atmosphere of each performance. Between the sets, we had to quickly coordinate the equipment and set up or take down the projection system, making organisation and teamwork an important part of the experience.