Pink Floyd's "The Wall" Turns 30 Cinema 4D was used to create a contemporary design.

At its debut, Pink Floyd's stage show "The Wall" was on of the most spectacular concert shows that had ever been presented. For its 30th anniversary the bar was set high for a revival! But with Cinema 4D, Roger Waters had an ace up his sleeve with which he could master even the biggest challenge…

30 years have already passed since Pink Floyd made pop music history with the album and concert tour for "The Wall". 30 moving years during which "The Wall" was made into a movie, Pink Floyd regrouped several times and various "anniversary concerts" made "The Wall" a classic once and for all.

When Roger Waters asked Sean Evans from Deadskinboy Design to create and arrange new stage visuals for the 30th anniversary "The Wall" concert it was a real challenge. The first concert was to be held in New York where Waters would play the concert again in its full length. Evans had already been involved in the project in 2009 and had worked on the basic design of the concert posters for Waters. Evans had worked on various projects in the music industry for 15 years, had created covers and posters for numerous well-known bands and had experience with almost every technique used to create such artwork.

However, the challenge that had been presented to him now couldn't be compared with any of hi previous projects: This time he had to create the content for an 80-meter wide stage screen. This was equal to five images in HD resolution. In addition, a circular screen, in front of which Roger Waters was to stand and play, had to be combined with the large screen on command, resulting in the creation of an unbelievably large screen. In the end, the images had a final resolution of 8560 x 1620 - and were animated at that!

Given this technical challenge in combination with his visual concept, Evens decided to take a closer look at Cinema 4D to see if his requirements could be met. According to Evans himself it only took him a few hours to be ready to realize his visions using Cinema 4D.

The scale of production grew and became more complex. Evans moved his base of operations to Breathe Editing Studios, which hi co-owns with Andy Jennison. A graphics workstation was also acquired, which was used to do compositing in After Effects. Rendering the immensely huge images turned out to be a real challenge: several render farms refused to take the job so Breathe Studios set up its own render farm with 17 workstations.

Finally, after all technical issues had been resolved, Evans was able concentrate entirely on content creation, which had to both capture the feeling of the original show and present a thoroughly refreshed look. Evans again found his solution in Cinema 4D.

"To re-create the sequence with the marching hammers and adapt this to the requirements of the new stage visuals we simply imported the sequence from the movie into Cinema 4D. The hammers were then modeled, animated and rendered using Cinema 4D's Sketch and Toon. Altogether, we tried to match the look of the classic as closely as possible. For "Goodbye Blue Skye" we originally tried to create a new look but we ended up going back to the original concept. The then took the sky from the original animation and used it as a texture on a 3D object."

"Waiting For the Worms" is another piece for which Evans created a dramatic scenery using Cinema 4D: he designed a bridge landscape that resembled German autobahn architecture from the Third Reich and had huge red worms slither through the trusses and other openings. Evans used the plugin "Add the Sea" to make the worms, which were merely extruded Splines, slither and bend.

The most spectacular piece from "The Wall" is "Comfortably Numb", in which the isolation that results from the ubiquitous presence of the wall is most noticeable. During the show at the song's peak, Roger Waters strikes the wall, which causes it to crumble into pieces to reveal a colorful wonderland behind it. For this, Evans used the Xplode plugin and used Cinema 4D's MoDynamics to cause the rubble to drift apart in such a manner as to give the impression of great mass, vehemence and volume when the wall breaks apart.

The visuals that Evans created for the 30th anniversary tour of "The Wall" not only won over Roger Waters but have also thrilled hundreds of thousands of excited concertgoers - with many more to come...