Eye Garden puts the spotlight on Brand New, with help from Disguise

Fans of American alt-rock group Brand New had been waiting over seven years for the band to reunite, when, in spring 2025, a 24-date US tour was announced. As the group prepared for their new run of gigs, they called upon Brooklyn design studio Eye Garden to deliver visual backdrops that would help draw audience attention back to the musicians onstage.

Eye Garden’s team called on their longstanding collaboration with Disguise to deliver understated yet visually impressive content that not only acted as an additional light source for the performers, but also could be easily adapted to the different stages and venues that Brand New were set to appear at.

The Challenge

The creative brief for Eye Garden’s lighting and video production on Brand New’s reunion tour was intended to keep the band at the heart of their performance, so the studio needed to steer away from overly-complex backdrops in favour of simple, cinematic video content which would effectively draw the audience’s focus back upon the musicians. Forgoing overwhelming visuals meant they could instead use their media in an intentional, minimalistic way.

Brand New’s dynamic live performances don’t use time codes, and so the team also needed to be able to adapt to what was happening onstage at any given moment. From the LED visuals to the footage captured by the six live cameras in the venue, the operator’s ability to pull together a cohesive show in the moment would prove vital to each performance.

For Eye Garden, the most crucial part of the project was delivering a consistent show every night. The Brand New tour would be taking in venues with capacities ranging from 2,000 to 15,000, and each location would bring new stage dimensions and challenges. Video content needed to work on both a forty-foot-tall wall and a twelve-foot-tall one. Eye Garden needed to work with a practical and flexible solution that could adapt to whatever challenges arose.

The Solution

Eye Garden had just six weeks to design and realise the production. They turned to Disguise’s intuitive solution to design a complex and flexible show that a lighting operator could easily manage on their own.

The team decided to use two of Disguise’s EX 3+ media servers, which would enable them to deliver seamless video playback, scalable to each stage on the tour. Knowing they had a powerful media server behind them, they were able to create a pixel map that was significantly larger than they needed on a day-to-day basis, which provided them with extra flexibility and more options for what they could display during the shows. 

This flexibility meant that the team would always be able to capture the heart of the action onscreen when displaying live footage of Brand New’s performance. The EX 3+’s four inputs also gave the team plenty of different feeds to pick and choose from during any given show.

The power that EX 3+ offered the team also enabled the creation of more complex, layered designs. For one of Brand New’s most popular songs, Lit Me Up, Eye Garden worked with eight different layers. The complexity of these designs would not have presented significant challenges if the show had been time-coded and every aspect was prepared weeks or months in advance. But the band had opted not to use time codes at all, which enabled them more flexibility night to night - and more opportunities to perform a show that was unique and meaningful for the fans in the room at that specific moment in time.

With the show not using time codes, the seamless transitions between Lit Me Up’s different layers could have been incredibly difficult to manage without the simplicity and flexibility of Disguise’s workflow. Instead, the team found that they could create exactly the end product they wanted, on the fly, neatly blending layers to ensure a stunning visual backdrop for the band.

The Results

Eye Garden’s practical and flexible solutions enabled them to deliver a stunning visual set for the band to perform on each night, fully controlled by a lighting operator. The towering screens provided atmospheric yet minimalistic backdrops that were integral to the way Brand New performed on stage, offering dramatic lighting and dynamic footage throughout each show. Every night was unique, and the team revelled in the ability to make changes on the fly, triggering faders and transitions in real time.

For fans, the most important thing was how unobtrusive Eye Garden’s work was. Everything was built to draw focus back onto the band. When live footage from the cameras played amid the smoke and lights onstage, the design of the performance blended seamlessly into the performance itself, making it hard to distinguish where the lighting ended and the video began. All that mattered in that moment was that Brand New were back on stage, and they sounded - and looked - as good as ever.

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