Case Study - Spiritbox - 2025 Content Direction

Spiritbox 'Tsunami Sea' Tour 2025

Spiritbox

Services

Content Direction

Motion Production

Show Design

Realtime Visuals

3D/VFX Design

Summary

Immersive visuals for Spiritbox’s Tsunami Sea tour—an elemental, surreal world shaped by grief, memory, and the haunting pull of home. A journey through storm-swept terrain where beauty, tragedy, and identity are in constant flux.

Challenge

To support the release of Tsunami Sea in 2025—including a pre-release performance at London’s Alexandra Palace, the band’s biggest headlining show to date—Spiritbox set out to create more than a live show. This was a personal reckoning, an emotional return to source. Vocalist Courtney LaPlante described the album as confronting grief, inherited pain, and the complicated magnetism of “home.”
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EFFIXX was brought on to translate these themes into an immersive visual language for their largest tour yet. The challenge was to build a world that could hold both violence and vulnerability—evoking myth, memory, and emotional magnitude—without relying on genre tropes or digital excess. It needed to feel real, fractured, and elemental.

Approach

We anchored the visual design in a reimagined version of Vancouver Island—LaPlante and guitarist Mike Stringer’s birthplace—rendered as a windswept, liminal landscape caught in a loop between ruin and rebirth. Environments were crafted using a hybrid toolkit of Unreal Engine, Cinema 4D, and Notch, fusing analog glitch textures with deep oceanic blues, volcanic fog, and abstract, mythic forms.
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Original characters—hybrid spirits, gods, and lost figures—acted as recurring avatars in the visual narrative, echoing the album’s themes of fragmentation and identity.
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To tie everything together in the live setting, we extended the visual world into IMAG looks that warped and glitched the real-time camera feed—embedding the band’s performance inside the same dream logic as the show content. Across screens and songs, Tsunami Sea became a cycle of flooding and release—both musically and visually.

Tsunami Sea:
Show Reel

A cinematic overview of Spiritbox / Tsunami Sea tour visuals

A curated montage capturing the worldbuilding, intensity, and emotional breadth of the visuals crafted for Tsunami Sea. Featuring select scenes from the band’s Alexandra Palace pre-release performance and key tour moments across North America and Europe.

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Live Integration:
Notch & IMAG

Real-time visual effects built for stage and screen

Using Notch, we created custom performance-reactive content for select tracks, designed to echo the show’s broader aesthetic. These looks were mirrored across IMAG treatments—tailored to the band’s on-stage presence and giving live footage a heightened, atmospheric quality.
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Characters & Mythical Environments

Sculpting nonhuman figures and elemental landscapes

Inspired by Tsunami Sea’s themes of loss and homecoming, we developed a series of digital figures and imagined environments—including re-creations of Vancouver Island’s forests and coastline—serving as dreamlike anchors throughout the show narrative.
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Analog Glitch
& Practical Effects

Textural, in-camera looks with a hand-made feel

Blending physical techniques—like feedback loops, lens filters, and CRT overlays—with digital layering, these visuals evoke fragility and transformation. Created in collaboration with visual artist Peter Clark, they add raw texture and instability to key narrative moments.

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Tsunami Sea Island:
Between Memory and Myth

A surreal return to a mythic version of home

Built in Unreal Engine 5, this original environment reimagines Vancouver Island through the emotional lens of Tsunami Sea—a liminal, elemental space that appears in the show’s intro and interludes. Waterlogged forests, shifting tides, and fragmented terrain echo the album’s central themes of grief, memory, and the gravity of home.
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Behind the Scenes

Process stills, concept art, and on-set documentation

A closer look at our creative development process—from early animatics and visual research to stage rehearsals and final content delivery—offering insight into the collaborative engine behind Spiritbox’s most personal tour yet.
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Moments from the Tsunami Sea Tour

Fan & Official Tour Documentation

A curated collection of striking fan photos alongside official tour images by photographer Alex Bemis, capturing the raw energy and intimate moments of the Tsunami Sea tour. These visuals complement the show’s immersive atmosphere and showcase the deep connection between Spiritbox and their audience.
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The Result

The Tsunami Sea tour was met with critical acclaim, praised for its immersive visual storytelling and seamless blend of analog textures with cutting-edge technology. The reimagined Vancouver Island environment and character-driven visuals deepened fans’ connection to the music and themes of loss, home, and identity. The show’s unique art direction and dynamic IMAG content elevated the live experience, making it one of the band’s most memorable and visually compelling tours to date.

Credits

Timothy Saccenti

Director

Dina Chang

Producer / Post Supervisor

Setta Studio

Creative Director

Joshua Zucker-Pluda

Cinematographer

Anthony Ciannamea / EFFIXX

3D VFX / Digital Sculptures

Christopher Leckie

Art Director