Has festival cinematography gone too far? A thought about Tomorrowland and the way we remember festivals
I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and I’m curious to know whether anyone else feels the same.
One aspect of electronic music festivals that I don’t think gets discussed enough is how the festival is filmed:** **live sets, aftermovies, teasers, recaps, all of it. And Tomorrowland is probably the best example I can think of.
If you go back to the early 2010s, the footage obviously looks much less polished than what we get today. But somewhere around 2015–2017, I feel like Tomorrowland found an almost perfect balance between the rawness of older footage and the technological evolution of cameras, drones, stabilization, editing, etc.
The 2016 and 2017 (2017 in particular) era in particular has a very distinctive feeling to me. Everything already looks incredibly good, but it still feels human. You can feel that you’re watching a camera operator who is actually there, surrounded by thousands of people, trying to capture a moment rather than recreate one in post-production.
Even the occasional heavy color grading could add to the atmosphere. The 2014 aftermovie, for example, has that warm/golden, almost rose-gold look in some sections, which works incredibly well with the The Key to Happiness theme. It’s stylized, but it still feels like a memory of an actual place and an actual event.
But somewhere after that, I feel like things started changing quite dramatically.
Modern Tomorrowland footage is objectively incredible. The cameras are better, the drones are better, the editing is insane, the transitions are incredibly elaborate, and the production quality is probably unmatched.
And yet… sometimes it feels almost too perfect.
This is obviously just my personal perception, and I want to emphasize that feels is the important word here, because I’m sure there are people who work in festival production and cinematography who could explain what I’m missing.
But when I watch some of the more recent footage, it sometimes feels like every single shot is under constant control. Drone movements, perfectly timed transitions, stage effects, crowd shots, camera positions, lighting… everything seems designed to produce the most spectacular possible image.
And ironically, I think that can make the festival itself feel less spectacular.
The older footage often showed you the DJ, the crowd, the atmosphere, and let the moment exist. You could actually get a sense of what kind of energy that particular DJ was creating.
Nowadays, sometimes it feels like the camera is more interested in showing you how spectacular Tomorrowland looks than in showing you what it feels like to be there.
You can really notice this by putting an old 2013 set next to a 2026 set. Even if the crowd in both videos isn’t particularly active. The difference isn’t necessarily the production value of the festival itself, but the way the camera interprets what is happening.
I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing, and I certainly don’t think Tomorrowland’s current production team is doing a poor job. Quite the opposite. What they’re producing is technically astonishing.
I just wonder if, in the pursuit of making everything look like a cinematic masterpiece, we’ve lost a little bit of the imperfection that made these videos feel like memories rather than advertisements.
Maybe I’m completely wrong, but I genuinely miss that feeling of watching an old Tomorrowland set and thinking: “I wish I was there.”
Nowadays, sometimes my reaction is more: “Wow, that’s an incredible video.”
And to me, those are two very different feelings.
