[MUSIC PLAYING]
BRAD SPAHR: Madison Beer's a singer-songwriter on the Epic
Records label, which is part of Sony Music Entertainment,
and this experience features a number of songs from her first
album, Life Support.
ALEX HENNING: We're using a real-time engine
to create a, quote, unquote, "live experience" of Madison
performing in the Sony Music Hall in New York.
BRAD SPAHR: We wanted to really push the envelope,
in terms of creating a realistic concert simulation,
and what could we then do to create
this layer of fantasy or fantastical visuals
on top of that?
We worked with our partner, Hyperreal,
to recreate Madison as an avatar.
It was imperative that she looked real, her dance moves,
her mouth, her hair, her dress, all the way
down to her earrings being able to naturally move as she danced
and performed the concert.
ALEX HENNING: From there, our challenge
is just to do all that hard work justice with how we presented
in the stage environment with the lighting
design, the effects package.
Really show it off and make it pop.
Make it exciting for people to experience.
BRAD SPAHR: Unreal Engine, to us, was clearly the best engine
and had the best set of technologies
to allow us to realize a very ambitious project.
There was no other option that was close.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
ALEX HENNING: The Sony Hall, in many ways,
it's got almost the perfect amount of dimension
for a project like this.
BRAD SPAHR: And we wanted a venue that
was based on a real place to ground things in reality,
and ultimately, we decided to construct it entirely
from scratch.
And so we'd never actually physically stepped foot
into the venue, and Madison never stepped foot in there
to perform.
And when that all came together for the first time,
we were like, whoa.
We knew we had something special.
The lighting was a big part of that.
When we layered on fire and rain, star fields, and all
of the fantastical things that were in the experience,
the hair stood up.
This is an entirely new era of content creation.
When we did the motion capture of Madison,
she performed the full 9 and 1/2-minute concert straight
through.
Because we had a real-time 3D asset,
it opened itself up for a very natural virtual production
opportunity.
Let's bring a DP in and actually do this
like we would do a real concert, but have the flexibility
of essentially unlimited takes.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TOM GLYNN: And then you start learning all the tricks
that they can add, given that it's virtual,
so you can take a dolly--
it's a straight track--
and translate that straight track
dolly to a loop or a curve or moving up and down.
It's when you start understanding this real world
equipment, how it can translate and change
its shape into the virtual reality,
your mind explodes, and you're like, wow,
this is powerful stuff.
ALEX HENNING: The part of all this
that just remains so compelling to me
is just what you can do once you've created
something in the engine.
It just really allows you to focus all your energy
and creativity on creating the world itself,
knowing that you can do the VR interactive piece
and the mobile AR version and the pixel-streamed version
and the 2D video extract for YouTube or TikTok,
that you can pull all of these different versions out
of that singular effort.
BRAD SPAHR: To be able to sit down with an artist
and say, dream up your fantasy experience for your fan--
we don't have laws of physics.
We don't have fire code and safety to abide by.
And to know that the tools and the technology
exist to make that a reality is the most
exciting thing for artists and the music industry.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[BOOM]