Doja Cat’s world tour took generative Notch visuals to 5 continents with Disguise GX 3

With 63 shows across 5 continents, Doja Cat’s global Tour Ma Vie was a whirlwind of 80s-inspired style, live music, fireworks, and impressively designed Notch visuals that Video Engineer Rebecca Gerhard helped maintain live night after night, thanks to the Sockpuppet workflow in Disguise’s Designer software.

This workflow enabled the team to fully control the show’s visual layers and parameters from a single lighting desk, giving them more creative flexibility to tweak the IMAG content and screen levels on the fly during shows. Disguise’s GX 3 media server was used to power the show by running large generative Notch blocks that could be displayed with consistency at every location, despite changing screen setups.

The challenge

For Rebecca, the biggest challenge on Doja Cat’s tour was to manage the changing video systems involved in every country. Together with Michael Hankowsky, who built the creative framework and initial server programming, and Blink’s Harold Sherr, who designed the generative content in Notch, Rebecca needed to navigate local hardware, regional signals, and power infrastructure between countries throughout the tour, all while trying to communicate across different language barriers.

“At the same time, we also needed to deploy a complex stage setup at every location,” Rebecca reveals. “We had a flown cube above the band riser, another cube that wrapped around the riser, and then, for the wings of the stage, ribbons tiered with lights as well as IMAG screens. All this multi-surface design depended on strict spatial alignment, as well as intricate lighting cues. Plus, we needed to display pixel-perfect content that would adapt to fluctuating local LED rasters. I had to build a system that I could rely on every single day, no matter where I was, who I was working with, or what signal flavours we had.”

The solution

To achieve consistent stability while retaining the flexibility needed to busk live, Rebecca relied on Designer and 2 GX 3 media servers. “Running on Disguise’s GX 3 media servers gave us solid playback night after night, whether we were locking into timecode or making live IMAG tweaks from the console,” she explains. “Having that level of power under the hood just gives you total confidence in a smooth show.”

The show was built using Designer’s Sockpuppet workflow through exposing key Notch parameters and patching them into the grandMA3 lighting desk. By creating virtual lighting fixtures out of pixels, the desk was programmed to trigger real-time bumps, intensity hits, and colour shifts chasing timecode.

The team also relied on Designer’s DMX Screen feature to program the light boxes; which were integral to the video design of the show. To overcome raster changes at each stop of the tour across international local suppliers, they used Designer’s Feed Maps to quickly adjust content maps day to day. This could mean changing the output size, rotating slices, resizing IMAG or resampling content across rasters. Using the 3D visualiser, the team was able to previz full-stage looks before outputting to local LED processors.

The results

Disguise’s ecosystem provided the processing headroom and flexible workflow required to run heavy generative Notch blocks across every single song on a single unified timeline, across 30 global dates and 5 continents, all while making adjustments live.

“At the heart of all the shows I work on is the rhythm and the community of live music,” Rebecca reflects. “If I can feel the music by VJing live, the audience can feel that rhythm in the way I operate the show. IMAG is so important to every show now, and content plays a large role in setting the stage. Thanks to Disguise, we could use cameras for live capture and Notch content for some of the major scenic elements, catapulting video to becoming another playing member of the band.”