I HAD ALREADY COLLABORATED on another project with tour director Jon Dunleavy of My Chemical Romance when he sent me a twenty-eight page PDF full of all kinds of intriguing, random images pulled from various art exhibits. Rather than asking to stitch the disparate slides from this creative deck together, Jon directed my attention to just one picture therein. I pondered the image - a dance piece from some small black box theatre - and put together a basic animation that illustrated the kernel of a design. We scheduled a meeting with Gerard Way, singer of the band and author of the Dark Horse Comics “Umbrella Academy” series. Gerard immediately saw the potential in the design and together we fleshed out a scene that depicted souls on earth climbing up to an angel that would hang above and behind the band.

Just as we were beginning to engineer the touring pieces with world-renowned staging constructors Tait, we received word that there would be a new design direction and we needed to get cracking on something more… dystopian. Gerard had composed a new song titled “The Foundations Of Decay” and he and the other band members had decided that they were going to play their shows in the wreckage of a possibly dark future given the direction that our world seems to be heading these days.

The task was now to pull images together that would be built in to physical set pieces to give real world depth and dimension to the scene behind them. In the distance we placed a printed backdrop of a city barely standing, and the plan was to have different bombed-out buildings, vehicles and general rubble in the foreground made of a combination of tall staging flats and carved styrofoam set pieces. Tait took my renderings and engineered a touring set that is simply spectacular. For a change, their shop was not building frames for LED panels; the band did not feel that they wanted to play in front of video screens, and therefore the background would have to become kinetic with light and shadow. Leaning over in the midst of the rubble, a neon sign for a now-destroyed pest control business would mysteriously begin to work during the band’s encore break.