Jazz is everywhere!
The project is a collaboration with the Montreal Jazz Festival and consists of 8 augmented reality monuments dedicated to specific jazz themes and legends.
Client: Montreal Jazz Festival
Content direction: Valérie Darveau
Audio: Grand Public
The Montreal Jazz fest is the World’s largest Jazz Festival. It attracts more than 2 million visitors every year and has showcased artists like Anderson Paak, Erykah Badu, Ella Fitzgerald and Prince over 43 years of history. And over these years, it has amassed a trove of exclusive archives.
The Jazz fest approached us to find ways to breathe new life into these archives. We wove a story around the idea that Jazz is everywhere. A story that explains Jazz’s influence in today’s music. That takes us on a journey beyond the borders of jazz. And that highlights Montreal’s own rich history with jazz.
The project consists of a series of 8 AR monuments dedicated to specific themes and jazz legends. It showcases musical, photo and video archives from the festival’s 43 year history. It features rich storytelling that represents over 15 minutes of original narrative content.
It’s also, in our humble opinion, the AR experience with the best soundtrack ever, featuring artists such as Aretha Franklin, Miles Davis, Leonard Cohen, the Roots, Kamasi Washington, Muddy Waters and Patrick Watson.
The sculptural monuments pay tribute to Jazz icons. Each of them has a distinct aesthetic that magnifies the musical discovery of its theme. For example, the monument dedicated to voice in jazz, with its fluid shapes and warm colors, evokes lightness, freedom, depth, and femininity. The one dedicated to Montreal as a cradle of jazz, in Saint-Henri, illustrates the evolution of festive, joyful, and colorful music, with dynamic shapes and bright hues. These living monuments were designed in perfect harmony with the music, and their animations are influenced by its rhythm, frequency, and intensity.
