Deadmau5 Rick & Morty New Years // Concert Visuals
Nexus has worked with Joel Zimmerman, also known as Deadmau5, on multiple occasions, but his New Year's event in Los Angeles was something different. For this show, Joel wanted a "Time Bomb" to detonate exactly at midnight, while Rick and Morty scrambled to disarm it in front of the audience.
We had already been creating animations and perspective-driven graphics for his cube setup to simulate layered depth using forced perspective. This project used the same visual technique. Instead of relying on traditional character animation, which would have taken more time and budget, Joel connected with Justin Roiland, the original voice of both Rick and Morty. Together, they quickly developed a script and recorded voice-over that we used as the base for production. From there, we jumped into VR to bring the performance to life.
Joel reached out to the team at VR Chat, who offered access to a virtual greenscreen studio and official Rick and Morty avatars. With the voice-over track loaded in, we all entered VR together to act out the scene live. The avatars responded to the audio in real time, with accurate mouth movement that matched the dialogue.
Matt Milstead captured the session using screen recording and composited the footage into a 3D environment in After Effects. Once the animation was ready, we tested the visuals on Joel’s mini cube at his studio to ensure the angle and timing were spot on. After a final sync, Joel integrated the animation into his live show, and the bomb went off right at midnight.
