Taylor: Who/What has influenced you the most in your career? What led you down this route? 

Dustin: You know, I’m really into music and festivals. I saw this band, Sound Tribe Sector 9. I was a big fan of their lighting designer that was moving head lighting through haze. Then, projection mapping kind of blew up in 2011 and 2012. V Squared Labs is a company that did the ISAM project as well as a bunch of other very large EDM stages, and I was like, wow, that's really cool. I'd already learned a lot about animation and I'd kinda learned how to mix videos in a live setting. Once projection mapping happened, I was like, oh, I really want to learn how to project on not just flat surfaces. Then as things have developed, I’ve been a big fan of Android Jones’ work and Alex Gray’s work. Visionary artwork in general has been a huge influence with them. Working with Papadosio has been a lot of that kind of imagery too.

Taylor: What’s something that you did as a student, that helped you prepare for your career?

Dustin: I made a thesis my senior year. It was called “Shape,” and it was an animation about sacred geometry and how it manifests itself in the universe. I was staying up on the computer all night and getting in the workflow where you don't care how much time you’re spending on something and you're just doing it because you want to do it. Your goal is to create something beyond an assignment, and if it becomes your passion project, then you're probably going to dedicate yourself.

I learned After Effects and took animation classes. Then under Silva, I had this six-by-one class. That was really awesome. I learned how to work on something in a very quick way. Sometimes you spend too much time and you can't create really cool stuff in the instant. That was inspiring, I'd say, in terms of getting into production for concerts. It's crazy when you work on a film for so long and you have this thing at the end of it, but when you work concerts every night, you're like, I hope this goes well! And when it's over, it's vanished. Sometimes we'll have a film, but there's something very beautiful about temporary installations.

Taylor: Could you describe your typical work day?

Dustin: It was very different before COVID than it is now. On tour it would be: wake up, unload a trailer, start setting up all the gear onstage with about four hands, telling them where to put things and hoping they set it up right the first time (fingers crossed), then programming the stuff. A lot of times, you have the rig that you bring to a place and then the rig that exists there already. You do your best to program it, but everything doesn't always work out like you think it's going to on your computer, so you spend about the next couple of hours fixing it. You maybe eat dinner and then you: do the show, put all the stuff back in the trailer, fall asleep, and then the bus takes you to a different place. You wake up and do it like four or five more times. After that, you sleep for two or three days and then you do it all again a couple more times. 

Taylor: In the projection mapping videos you have on your website, there're so many different elements in place. How do you begin brainstorming and designing? 

Dustin: Well, there's a couple of different situations. If you had all the money in the world, all the space, what would you do? That's a great situation to try to figure out and, unfortunately, that's like 0% of the time. Realistically for 80% of the shows, you look at how big the space is, what's actually there already, how much time you have to do something in the first place, and then how much budget do you have to bring in elements. A lot of times it will be a combo of the best bang for buck and what will not take too much time to set up. If you tried to set up something too big in a day, you won’t have time to program it. There's always so many different situations, and it really changes depending on them. 

Festivals are great because you have a bunch of people that want to be around for a week and do something amazing. I've worked at this festival called Envision down in Costa Rica, and people will stay there for three months, just like building a stage out of elements they find in the jungle. There are still financial things that come into the design, but it's really the passion and the people's creativity that are put into it. You end up getting a lot more creative, collaborative, beautiful designs, and you can really crush out on a one-day concert. It's kind of the beauty of it. You do what you can, when you can. Just create and see what happens, and if you're happy with the result, great. If not, you can create more tomorrow.

Taylor: What’s one project that you've been the most proud of?

Dustin: I got to design a show at Red Rocks in 2019, and I had full creative control of the rig. I was really happy with how it came out and getting to have a budget that was eight to nine times anything else that I've ever had for a show; it was awesome. It's also just like a beautiful, legendary venue- think amazing sound, gorgeous scenery and everything. It felt good to do a show in a place that I've always wanted to, on a scale that I got to have full control over. I spent almost four months creating a rig and doing a bunch of virtual lights, essentially doing it all in 3D where you can get it as close as you can. The kind of crazy thing about Red Rocks is, unless you can get there right the night before, (which is pretty expensive to do and which unfortunately we didn't have the budget for) all the programming that you do, you only see when the sun goes down that night. You can get things as close as you can in terms of the positions of the lights and everything hung correctly, but a lot of the times you’ve got to tweak it.

Taylor: Do you have any advice for students that want to enter this field?

Dustin: I'd say if you want to try and make some videos, go ahead and download Resolume Arena, download MadMapper, download TouchDesigner. A lot of these softwares have watermarks, but you can still learn them. A better computer is obviously going to run it better, but you don't have to run everything at 4k. You can use it even if you have a crappy computer; run it at low resolution. If you want to play with these things, go ahead and do it. Don't not explore the thing that you're thinking about. I knew I wanted to play around with mixing live video probably four years before I ever did it. And I'm like, why didn't I download that software and see if I liked it or not? Just do what you love. 

Taylor: I saw that you did projection mapping on the monument of Robert E. Lee this past summer, what inspired you to protest this way?

Dustin: Like a lot of people this summer, after being cooped up inside and seeing what happened with George Floyd, I wanted to go out and raise my voice against police brutality and against racism. Especially with things like what happened in Charlottesville and what happened in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015. Also being from Richmond, you know, Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy, there's a lot of old southern energy. Richmond was one of the largest slave markets in the country for a long time. Naturally, the protest movement started swarming around these symbols of white supremacy, just from the history of the city. 

I was out trying to support, use a lot of the tools that I have, and my specific knowledge set to add what I could to the conversation. We were out there really just supporting the protest, and then it kind of turned into a viral thing. We made it into a multiple night thing, and then the content really started changing. What started as a projection of images of people who were killed by the police, turned into historical black figures, people who have stood up against racism, and powerful black American personalities, to try to overpower this six story monument of white supremacy that was still existing in Richmond. It's literally six stories high, so people couldn't get to the top to spray paint messages. Having a projector, knowing projection mapping, and being able to put texts in those places very easily -- it was just kinda like, all right, well, we can't pull a ladder over here, but I can at least put BLM on this horse and, no justice, no peace at the top.

Alex and I got a ton of positive credit from the media, but really there were organizers that were there doing a lot more work. Support people that are actually making change and always try to give a shout out to the people that are really doing work on the ground in their communities and trying to make things better out there.