It was 11 am at my hotel room in Chicago – Ruel was playing Lollapalooza that afternoon, and we had a call time of 2 pm at the festival. One slight problem: I hadn’t finished all of the stage visuals yet, and it was only six hours until he was on stage.
My journey with 3D art started during the COVID lockdown. I downloaded Blender (3D software) and spent the next 12 hours speed-running through tutorials. It quickly became an obsession that consumed my life in the same way that music production does.
For me, making it scratches the same creative itch that making music does. In both cases, you’re using software to translate a creative vision in your head into a tangible product that others can experience, which is an extremely rewarding process in itself. Whether it’s through music or visual art, I have an innate addiction to creating things.
In 2024, about six months into my journey with 3D art, I was asked to create visuals for Ruel’s 4th Wall World Tour. At that point, I had only made 3D art by following tutorials and had never worked on a project for a client with deadlines and stakes. Nor did I have any prior experience with the technicalities of making live visuals for the stage, so obviously, I said yes and figured I’d work it out throughout the process.
A month later, I was at Ruel’s sold-out Sydney show with 9,000 fans in the arena with my visuals playing on stage; the feeling I got was very similar to the feeling I get when I see a sold-out crowd singing a song I made. Funnily enough, that also happened the same night as I did some additional production on Younger by Ruel earlier in my career.
Fast forward a year, and I’m out in Los Angeles in the studio for a few weeks. I’d been chasing Ruel’s team up and trying to finalise the visual brief for the Lollapalooza set, which was happening in a few weeks. A few weeks became two weeks, which became one week until it was three days before the show when the creative brief came in like a landslide.
I hastily set up my laptop in my living room in Echo Park, poured out a coffee, and sat there for ten hours re-imagining the Hollywood Hills on my laptop. 12 pm quickly became 10 pm, and I had a very early morning flight that I had completely forgotten to pack for. Once I get into my flow state—whether it’s music or art—I’ll completely forget about everything else.
I flew out from LA to Chicago the next morning and was still working through the endless list of deliverables I had listed on my Notes app; I was working on the plane and would send progress updates on the airport Wi-Fi on my layover. I arrived in Chicago and headed to Ruel’s pre-Lollapalooza show, where I finished a majority of the visuals backstage, with Ruel popping in and out of the green room to see how it was coming together.
At the last minute, we decided it’d be hilarious to have a scene at the end of Painkiller where hundreds of pills descend the Hollywood Hills, smashing into the Hollywood sign.
The next day was Lollapalooza, and I was still going back and forth with the team from 7 am to tie up the final bits for the live visuals. In the rush of everything, I completely forgot about the intro sequence for the whole show. I quickly set myself up in the hotel room, smashed it out in record time, and then headed right out to the festival.
A few hours later, there it was on stage at Lollapalooza: Hundreds of pills falling down the Hollywood Hills, an idea thought of and brought to life the night before in a Chicago green room.
Taka Perry and Leon Fanourakis’s new single, Express, is out now. Check out the music video below.
