Things I've done

I took care of camera direction and, together with the lighting designer, technical production for the Italian delegation at the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest. We chose a distinctive minimalist, retro approach, which required a lot of precision in the camera work. I went as far as developing a custom camera previs tool to scout angles and test cuts on a virtual vision mixer before even getting on site.

For Fedez's big comeback in 2025, I took care of show direction and show calling, working closely with all departments - including Galattico's visual and live camera direction teams, for which I also served as creative director - to keep a large 360° arena show running smoothly, with more than 50 automation cues, moving transparent screens and platforms, and guests constantly coming on and off stage.

One of my favourite artists asked me to direct an animated music video in just two weeks, while I was on vacation in Thailand. How could I say no? Written entirely on a speedboat, with the storyboard dictated over the phone to a storyboard artist, and above all involving three exceptional illustrators and animators, it became such an incredible collective effort that it ended up receiving recognition and screenings at music video and animation festivals around the world.

The interesting part was holding a deliberately low-key visual world together with the scale of an arena: no muscular effects, just a visual language that looked homemade while running on real machines. The hard part was working out, every night, how little was enough.

A fashion show is a ten-minute show you prepare for months and can never run twice. The unusual part here was the interactive layer: content responding in real time to what was happening on the runway, with the error tolerance of a house that doesn't tolerate errors.

For Giorgio Poi's Schegge Tour, I based the set design around a dynamic structure of LED tubes inspired by the texture of the album cover. Scattered across the stage and featuring animated content produced as actual video clips, the zig-zag elements became almost co-stars of the show, joined by video projectors cutting shapes through the haze towards the audience and a lighting design built heavily around backlight.

Opera at the Circo Massimo in the summer of social distancing: an enormous stage, an orchestra spread across it, and multicamera direction that had to serve both the audience in the room and the broadcast. Directing cameras on opera means following a score, not a running order: you get it wrong in bars, not in minutes.

Same title, opposite context: the Baths of Caracalla, with the ruins as the set and stage light as the only ally. The challenge was doing again something already done without copying myself, inside archaeological constraints that decide for you where the cameras can go.

'Additional Creativity' is the honest job title for when you join a creative machine that is already enormous and already moving. The interesting work was finding the places where adding something made sense, and recognising the ones where the most creative thing to do was to touch nothing.

Coordinating the scenic side of a show by a faceless artist moves all the weight onto what you can see: the screen is literally the lead. The hard part was the logistics of a city-wide event with everyone's expectations in the middle, and Naples watching.

Doing creative direction and camera direction at once means designing the show and then having to shoot it yourself: every staging choice comes back at you as a framing problem. The Arena is a place where the strongest image is handed to you for free; the job is not to ruin it.

The biggest date of a project we had been building together for years: the problem wasn't filling the Forum with things, but taking something born intimate up to that scale without losing its voice. A lot of subtractive work, which is always the hardest kind to defend.

The tour where a method took shape: video, cameras and content designed as a single thing, with a deliberately anti-spectacular look that still has to be directed with the precision of a real spectacle. The unusual part was making something look accidental when it couldn't afford to be.

A reunion people had waited ten years for: the emotional material was already there in the audience, and the show just had to not betray it. Directing the show and the cameras at once, across ten nights in a row in the same arena, is a marathon dressed up as a sprint.

Sixty years of career are an infinite archive and a responsibility: the interesting part was building a contemporary visual language that didn't pretend the past wasn't there. And shooting a performer who never stands still for a second.

A show built around a real band and an artist who changes the setlist whenever he feels like it: the visual structure had to hold up under improvisation. Camera direction in those cases is half plan and half reflexes.

A music video is the format where you can afford ideas a show would never forgive. Here the interesting part was working by subtraction on a track that pushes, and the difficulty was the usual one with videos: no time, no budget, expectations of a feature film.

Two artists with a very strong, very referential visual world: the job was translating it into video content that was complicit rather than literal. Co-directing and producing the motion yourself means arguing with yourself at every delivery.

A historic couture house in the middle of a relaunch: the delicate part was using a new visual language without disrespecting an important archive. Balestra blue is a constraint and a gift at the same time.

Stadium scale changes everything: distances, timing, and an audience that mostly watches the show through the screens. Camera direction becomes the real set design, and sixty thousand people see every wrong cut.

Theatre, live music and video on a text that allows no decoration. The interesting part was producing content that stayed in service of the spoken word, with the constant temptation to do too much and the duty not to.

A city-wide institutional event with many players and many sensitivities: visual coordination there was mostly diplomatic work. The unusual part was the set: a world heritage city, which you can neither drill into nor hang anything from.

No video for once: set design only. Designing a set for an artist you usually work with on images is an interesting exercise in giving up your usual tools, and touring constraints — load-ins, trucks, different venues — draw half the project for you.

A live audiovisual performance, where the video doesn't accompany the music but plays along with it. The great and terrible part is that no render can save you: whatever happens, happens there.

A down-to-earth pop project with honest budgets: creative direction there is mostly about choosing well among the few battles you can afford. The best ideas of the tour came out of the limits, as usual.

Television has its own timing and its own hierarchies: interaction design inside a format like that means bringing live and software tools into a world that thinks in prime-time blocks. The interesting bit is where set design, graphics and television direction meet.

Ten years of a festival in the middle of the woods, doing literally a lot of things: direction, video, stages, problems. It was the gym where I learned that at a festival, creativity is ninety percent logistics in disguise.

The Calendar launch in New York: content for an event whose guest of honour is somebody else's photography. The job was building a visual context that showed the images off without ever competing with them.

The band. Getting on stage from the other side is the best professional refresher course I know: it reminds you what you can see, what you can hear and what doesn't work when you're the one under the lights. Also: it's fun.

A brand project inside a music context: the interesting balance was giving the brand the visibility it had been promised without the audience smelling advertising. It's a genre of visual writing of its own.

A thousand musicians playing together in an airport: the problem isn't the image, it's which one. Directing cameras on an orchestra of a thousand people means giving up on framing them all and continuously choosing who exists.

One of the first big jobs on the border between technology and show: interactive systems designed for stadiums, where everything has to be spectacular and at the same time proof against rain, heat, hurry and rock'n'roll. That's where I understood that reliability is an aesthetic choice.

The indoor chapter of the work that started in stadiums: more control, more darkness, and therefore more room for interactive systems. The interesting part was making content, lighting and whatever was happening on stage talk to each other in real time.

Rap in clubs and arenas: precise visual codes, an audience that knows them by heart and immediately spots anyone using them badly. The job was staying inside that language with some personality, without turning it into homework.

Mapping a motorbike is harder than mapping a building: small surfaces, curves, and an object the audience knows down to the millimetre. A short project but a technically instructive one, the kind that recalibrates your patience.

Motion design for a Paris shop window: a small looping format that has to work both for people walking past distracted and for people who stop. The interesting constraint is the loop itself: no beginning, no end, nowhere to cheat.

A self-produced interactive video installation, so with every freedom and no excuses. Projects without a client are the most ruthless: when something doesn't work, the only person to blame is available at any hour.

Working on Michelangelo's material puts a certain name under 'collaborators'. The task was animating without desecrating: finding the movement the image already carries inside instead of sticking one on top of it.

Partial visual coordination on a show built by an international team: the interesting work was the fit — getting the right content to the right place inside a machine somebody else had already designed.

A targeted contribution inside an enormous event in Monza: when you only look after part of the content, the challenge is coherence with everything you didn't make. A useful exercise in ego management.

Clubs are where a visual language actually gets born: few means, short distances, no chance of hiding behind the production. This is where the foundations of a job that lasted years were laid.

Co-signing the lighting of an event on the Naples seafront for an artist you never see: the light had to do the work of a face as well. A one-off event, unrepeatable by definition, with all the anxiety that comes with it.

Interactive systems inside a stadium and arena tour: the technical side has to disappear completely into the show, and success is measured by how many people think it 'just happened'.

VJing inside a global format synchronised with Belgium: half the show arrives by satellite, half of it you play yourself, and the seams must not show. A strange exercise in interpretation along somebody else's rails.

Coordinating the video content of a pop production at that scale mostly means holding suppliers, formats and revisions together so that nothing gets lost between one arena and the next. Invisible work when it goes well, extremely visible when it doesn't.

The move into theatres: same artistic project, completely different grammar. In a theatre, video has to learn some manners, and creative direction becomes a job of measure rather than invention.

Coordinating the visuals of an avant-garde festival means serving artists who each arrive with their own world (and their own formats, and their own VJs). The job is building the infrastructure that lets all those worlds happen on the same night.

A special project halfway between a concert and a story: creative direction had to hold narrative and setlist together without either eating the other. One-off projects are the freest and the least forgivable.

Camera direction for a rap show in arenas: fast cutting, a lot of handheld, and a close relationship between the artist and the lens. The hard part is keeping the energy up without turning the whole thing into a blender.

A big pop production, with a lot of content and a lot of hands on it: visual coordination was the job of holding it together — right versions in the right place, formats that talk to the right machines, and steady nerves as the date approaches.

A subtle, nocturnal visual world that would have been very easy to ruin with too much video. Visual direction there was mostly choosing what not to put in, and making light and content work as a single atmosphere.

A tour on the road in the literal sense: light structures, fast load-ins, and creative direction that had to work the same way in wildly different squares and theatres. Flexibility as a design choice, not as a fallback.

A mapping inside an arena during a sports event: television timing, surfaces never meant for projection, and an audience that came for the basketball. The interesting part was stealing attention without stealing the show.

Directing a video for two distant musical worlds (and two labels, and a brand): the creative work lived alongside a remarkable number of stakeholders. Good training in defending an idea in three different languages.

Playing visuals live at a festival that knows about visuals: a competent audience, demanding artists, no room for autopilot. The kind of night where you remember why you liked this job in the first place.

Directing your own band's music video is a walking conflict of interest: the director would like to cut the shot where the guitarist looks bad, but the guitarist is him. Made with very little, having fun in inverse proportion to the budget.

A long, packed show with a very wide stage front and six people to serve on camera: directing it was a job of fairness as much as of rhythm. And sold-out arenas don't forgive the wrong replay.

Corporate conventions in extended reality: virtual studios, camera tracking and the new problem of directing attention inside a space that doesn't exist. Corporate is the place where experimentation pays the rent.

A band with such a strong cinematic imagination that video always risks being redundant. The interesting part was working like a director of photography rather than a content designer.

A festival with dozens of artists and constant stage changes: visual coordination there is a question of system, not of individual content. Designing the method that holds up through two days of affectionate chaos.

A single date at San Siro: content coordination and shooting direction for a show that would not get a second chance. Event dates compress an entire tour into one evening, pressure included.

The first tour of an artist who blew up fast: the job was building a live visual world that kept up with the phenomenon without aping what had already been seen. Co-directing helps, when decisions are moving quickly.

Interactive systems in the service of a pop show in arenas: the technology had to be a moment of the show, not a demo. The criterion was simple: if you notice the trick, it's wrong.

A performance in a room made entirely of people who do this for a living: the most difficult and the most generous audience at once. The right place to test ideas commercial jobs can't afford, in front of people who notice.

Streaming a teatro-canzone festival: the language of the shoot had to respect the language of the stage, which with Gaber involved is not a detail. Streaming done properly is direction, not transmission.

Visual design for theatre, where video is an actor and not a backdrop: it comes on stage only when the dramaturgy needs it. Small scale, high care, the exact opposite of arenas, and an excellent exercise.

Directing a convention in 2020, which is to say the year conventions stopped existing in person: hybrid format, remote audience, and a grammar to invent on the fly. Educational, in the painful sense of the word.

Another video for the band, another round of production self-sufficiency: idea, direction, shooting and edit all in the family. The advantage of your own projects is that you can make mistakes in peace; the disadvantage is that you then know about them forever.

On the other side for once: producer, not author. The interesting work was creating the conditions for somebody else's ideas to happen, which is less romantic but teaches you a great deal about how to treat your own producers.

Video content for La Scala: the place where every choice goes through a tradition that is in no hurry to start liking video. The challenge was earning the right to be there, frame by frame.

A live audiovisual performance where image and sound are built together, without a safety net. My favourite format for reminding myself that video can be a musical instrument and not furniture.

An album cover is the smallest and most permanent visual project there is: it lives in stores, on phones, on vinyl, forever. Working on something still, for once, after years of images that last one evening.

The shoot around the Magmamemoria project: building a coherent body of images that had to work everywhere, from print to social to the live show. Coherence is the real deliverable, more than the individual photographs.

Directing a live shoot: translating into video a concert conceived for the room, choosing a point of view instead of pretending not to have one. Honest live shoots are interpretations, not documentation.

A title sequence is a format of a few seconds that has to survive dozens of repeated viewings: you design it closer to graphic design than to video. The constraint of duration is ferocious and good for you.

The titles for an event with a very strong political and popular identity: the language had to be direct without sliding into a propaganda poster. Motion design with one foot in the square and one in the TV schedule.

Bernstein at Caracalla: a ritual of a piece, with orchestra, choirs and an enormous open-air stage. The video content had to talk to the ruins without using them as a postcard backdrop, which is the number one temptation of that site.

Show caller and video engineer: the engine room of the show. When the artist doesn't appear, the video system is the show, and whoever calls it carries a responsibility the audience usually doesn't even know exists.

Photography and editing for a fashion campaign: departments where I usually direct other people, and that it's healthy to go back and do yourself once in a while. Luxury has a tolerance threshold on the image that recalibrates your eye.

A company anniversary with the ambitions of a real show: the interesting part was bringing concert language into an industrial context, and finding out that a corporate audience is moved just the same, if you let it be.

Amphitheatres and stone theatres: places that have already won, scenographically speaking. Creative direction was deciding how little to add, and making a contemporary visual project live alongside two thousand years of context.

A pop project with a strong, contemporary visual identity: the job was building a show that lived up to the artist's already very high photographic and video imagery, without simply copying it onto the stage.

Lighting and set for clubs: few instruments, a lot of intention. In clubs, light design is almost dramaturgy — every change is felt, and there's no video to hide behind. A healthy return to basics.

A one-off event in Rome, free and extremely crowded: from the show caller's position you hold the timing of the entire show. It's the role with the best ratio of importance to invisibility that I know of.

The Smog project brought into theatres: same poetics, spaces that ask for more quiet. Co-direction and motion design in the first person, with the usual theatre rule: if something can be taken out, it should be.

Executive technical production of a documentary film about a show at San Siro: dozens of cameras, an unrepeatable event and the responsibility that all the footage actually exists by the end of the night. The creative part was making everybody else's possible.

Projecting onto the Duomo is the kind of line you write as a joke in your goals when you're young. The technical difficulty — gothic surfaces, scale, permits — was nothing next to the cultural one: what do you have the right to draw up there?

Camera direction for a melancholic, elegant kind of rap: fewer cuts, more tension, cameras that wait instead of chasing. Every artist asks for a different directing grammar, and this one was unusually cinematic.

Paolo Conte at La Scala, for the first time: technical production of a documentary film about a historically unique event. The task was getting a film crew into a theatre that has rules of its own, without either of those two things being noticed.