PITCH MUSIC & ARTS

Pitch Music & Arts is an Australian electronic music-focused camping  festival that takes place in remote Victoria. Each year, 18.000 keen revelers assemble at the edge of the ancient Gariwerd mountain range, which has been an important spiritual place for indigenous Australians  for millennia. Studio John Fish is a Melbourne-based creative team that not only creatively directs the festival but also takes on the duty of stage design, lighting design, arts curation, and more. 

What sets Pitch apart from other music festivals in Australia is the  future-focused industrial aesthetic, which is a key part of the festival’s  brand identity. Designing for Australian outdoor conditions comes with a number of challenges, such as gale-force winds, unpredictable  heavy rain, extreme heatwaves, and strict building and safety codes.

Studio John Fish conceptualizes stage concepts that put sustainability and reusability at the forefront while also aiming to push boundaries  in relation to materiality and form. Another unique aspect is that the  stages are designed as complete standalone structures rather than just fascades like most festivals. 

An example is the Resident Advisor stage for the 2022 edition, where  they addressed a lack of seating and furniture for the festival by  designing a stage constructed entirely from over 650 export pallets,  which are reused every year. For this year’s edition, they designed a  stage that juxtaposed a large 12m diameter sphere on top of a grid of  scaffolding with custom-made video content projected onto the sphere  with a 32K Barco projector. 

The effect created an illusion of an imposing 3D geometric form that morphed above the framework. Minimal amounts of landfill are generated with all the components deconstructed and their process involves starting from the sketch phase and bringing the draft concepts into C4D to be refined. At this point, lighting and visual integration are considered, and 3D renders are created. The technical build details are developed and refined in Vectorworks, with the final stage being lighting, laser, and video design, which are previsualized in Capture. 

The studio is unique in that not only do they conceptualize, design, and build unique structures, including lighting, video content, and more, but also deliver a world-class arts program for the festival. Previous editions have featured artists such as Tundra, Iregular, Olivier Ratsi, to name a few. Studio John Fish also produces their own audio-visual-based sculptures that often integrate kinetic components with synchronized lighting and sound, all designed to immerse the audience in the beautiful and formidable Australian landscape. 

Website: www.studiojohnfish.com