(electronic music)
- [Eric] We've always almost lost money on EPIC,
it's been more of a passion project,
so we just started sketching on doing a live show
that would be kind of more future.
You want to give people an experience
as they walk away and like,
try and blow people's minds has always been
our kind of agenda.
I actually like seeing it from
the crowd's perspective, like they upload
these videos on YouTube and stuff.
And sometimes I can't believe...
It's insane.
I wish I was in the crowd.
(electronic music)
- [Dani] Eric Prydz is an icon
in the electronic music scene.
Most known for his hits, like "Call On Me,"
or through his many aliases, like Pryda or Cirez D.
But he also sets the standard for live shows.
He and his team are not only committed
to creating a showstopping spectacle,
but to developing new technology
to do things that haven't been done before.
Prydz and his team have spent
the past two years building EPIC Holosphere:
an 8-meter transparent LED sphere
for him to perform in.
(energetic music)
It was his most technologically advanced production to date,
but it only saw one show.
Despite a successful premiere at Tomorrowland,
part of the stage ceiling sank after
the festival's first weekend,
and the second show was canceled.
Only one audience saw the Holosphere performance live.
But first, The Verge got an exclusive look
behind the scenes at how it all came together.
- It started off with EPIC almost,
I think, it's almost ten years ago now.
And at the time, a lot of DJ acts
and electronic music acts were doing...
when they were doing shows, it was all kind of like
confetti cannons and fireworks and very much
the same stuff like, bands like Mötley Crüe
or Iron Maiden and stuff like that
were doing back in the '80s.
That kind of big arena, which was fine at the time
and it was cool, but we just felt that
we wanted to use kind of the technology
that now is available, that wasn't available then,
and just try and do an extension of the music.
- [Dani] EPIC stands for Eric Prydz In Concert.
Over the years, EPIC has included hundreds
of laser beams, millions of video pixels,
and colossal, hologram-like illusions.
- We had just done EPIC 4.0 and 5.0, which was
putting EPIC-- Eric in a cube, so we needed
to move away from that, we all felt.
So a sphere, at the time, was incredibly ambitious.
- [Eric] I do think that the whole sphere thing
is actually, I think it was Liam.
His idea was to do a sphere with a see-through
LED material, so they would appear
like holograms inside of it.
- [Dani] To get a sense of how
they planned to pull this off, I headed
to Light Initiative's workshop
to get a peek at construction.
- I was approached by Mark Calvert
with a... very interesting challenge
to create a video sphere.
And my first, first thought was that's really hard.
(Bryn and Dani laugh)
But immediately, it was like,
"Alright, how can we start to solve that?"
And the ideas came thick and fast.
So-- - Oh, so this is actually
how tall the sphere will be? - That's right, yeah.
That's it, yeah. - Wow.
Dang, this is massive.
- We've researched deeply the...
ways to which you could make a sphere and we're confident
that this way hasn't been done before.
- One of us came up with the idea
to look at the spheres that you would find
motorcyclists driving in at circuses.
I think they're called the sphere of death or something?
- Yeah.
- And I would just sit on YouTube,
just clicking through these videos late at night,
just trying to figure out how they built them
because a lot of the form carries similarities
to what we were trying to make.
I was just watching these videos at night
just thinking, "What am I doing with my life?"
(Dani laughs) - [Liam] Is this, is this
where this has come to?
- [Dani] So, with a plan in place
and fabricators on deck, they start
hammering away on building the Holosphere.
Everything you're seeing here has been custom made,
even the LED strips that get snapped into
the sphere's notches.
But the actual sphere is only one part.
It also needs lights, animations, and effects
to bring the Holosphere to life.
- The form that we're now using is...
requires an entirely different
pipeline to create the content.
This is what the content looks like
in its two-dimensional form, and...
that, when it's wrapped around a sphere,
gives us the form that we're looking at here.
The challenges in creating content for a spherical form
are that the content needs to live in what
I would call an equirectangular world.
- [Dani] Equirectangular world?
- Equirectangular. And that's essentially
what you would see if you were to take a camera
and film 360 degrees around you.
It gets flattened out into this kind of distorted,
dreamy, bizarre-looking image where up is no longer up,
and left is no longer left, and everything is just strange.
So, trying to get my head around
creating content within that world was a real challenge.
You kind of have to just change your thinking patterns
almost into another different dimension.
That sounds really crazy to say that, but it's true.
I took this video on my phone of me just looking around
rather dramatically, and used
that video to take into After Effects and track
the motion of my pupil here. And
that was able to drive the movement
of the sphere within Cinema 4D.
And what that gives is a very accurate motion
and a very accurate animation,
which is essentially true to life.
- What a lot of people don't realize is that
even though, you know, they buy a ticket
and they come to see a show,
and it's two hours, but for us it's been two years.
(electronic music)
(crowd cheering)
- [Dani] The team says they're unsure
if there will be other Holosphere performances
in the future.
I asked for an official comment
about what happened with Tomorrowland's Freedom stage.
Eric's manager Michael Sershall said,
"Due to safety concerns, [Tomorrowland] decided
to close the entire arena. We were
absolutely devastated, especially as it was
a situation beyond our control,
but safety is always paramount."
But EPIC shows are known
for being limited-run events.
Prydz and his team accomplished their creative goal,
and now, it's all about what's next.
- [Eric] Our live shows, they will evolve, and then
after this, something else will come.
New technology will come available
that we figure out a way to incorporate that,
and we will be able to do something
that we haven't been able to do before, you know?
And it's just on a continuous kind of,
in an organic way, just refines itself
and goes into different directions.
(electronic music)
- This video was brought to you by Aloft,
different by design.
Thanks for watching, hope you enjoyed it,
and let us know, what's the craziest show
you've ever been to?