8 CONCERTS & TOURING
Konnakol . “The thing with Zayn is: he’s quite stationary,” explains Routledge. “He likes his band tight to him. We looked at how to sit Zayn somewhere that the band encompasses him, while still immersing him and allowing him to get on and off stage easily – and the main way to do that is through video.” Ross ran with this idea, developing a video look that aligned with Routledge’s lighting design and colour palette. He added a live camera into the mix to provide visual content that they could then animate, rather than a raw feed. “We could take various scenes and build, organise and play with them, such as layerings, grids or columns – all sorts of interesting stuff to create a universe for Zayn to exist in, as opposed to just putting his face on a screen.” Ross hoped to give the visuals a ‘musicality and a rhythm to work with’, to immerse fans even further. “That got us to a nice point, where we could have conversations with Zayn’s management and begin a creative dialogue. ‘This is where we’re at. What do you think? How does it resonate? Is this the right or the wrong idea?’” he paraphrases. “From there, you start to figure out what’s working for everyone. Some ideas leave the process, some develop, some new ones join. “Once we’re fairly happy with the world we’re building,” Ross continues, “in terms of still frames, then we move on to motion. Because the timing was quite tight, we slammed straight into all songs. We’d send over Frame.io links to be commented on and reviewed, and that is a rolling process – you do it as it comes. That collaboration rolled forward and continued on-site.”
hen Zayn Malik left One Direction for his own musical pursuits, it was a sad day for Directioners – but a new beginning for the English artist. A decade into his solo career, Zayn announced his first arena headline tour (and second solo tour), the Konnakol Tour , named after his fifth studio album. With nine dates in the UK, Mexico and South America, the tour comes immediately after his 2026 Las Vegas residency – but brings Zayn closer to his audience than ever. “The brief was about simplicity,” begins Finn Ross, video creative director at Fray Studio. “It wasn’t about a vastly abstract concept; it was more about placing Zayn front and centre for the fans.” Fray Studio, the London-based design house that handled the tour’s video, animation and projection components, began work on Konnakol roughly eight weeks before it kicked off at London’s O2 Arena. Ross built a reduced, atmospheric world – and leaned on R&B influences to do so. “We looked at some alternative R&B shows, like Drake and Dave, as reference points. The idea I became interested in was: how do we achieve intimacy at scale? We have the real Zayn and then a big Zayn that everyone can see and connect with. How do we make that meaningful?” THE ART OF WORLDBUILDING Lighting designer Tim Routledge – who’s worked with Zayn on both his previous tour and his Vegas residency – spearheaded the initial development, creating a simple, two-toned look for
Zayn sits quite close to his band, while the lighting spotlights him (right)
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