Live Design Online: Once the NFL season kicks off every year, the folks at All Access start thinking about the Super Bowl Halftime Show, as they build the sets as designed by Bruce Rodgers at Tribe Inc. Produced by Roc Nation, this year's show was broadcast live from Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas on Sunday, February 11, with an estimated 123.7 million viewers.
7 comments:
I think that the dissection of the process that this article goes through is really interesting and informative. I love seeing other people's processes for how they go about design stages and build stages. This process is particularly interesting because of the added complication of the grass and the fact that they couldn’t actually test the setup on the grass until the actual performance. It was also imperative that nothing damages the grass at all because any damage can affect the gameplay and if they damaged the grass they would’ve gotten sued out of the wazoo. Another interesting thing to read about in this article was the stuff about the damaged pixels. Seamless video and LED screens are always fascinating to me. Having to make a video screen seamless and undamaged when it is the floor that people roller skating, dancing, and performing on is a huge challenge.
I think having to deal with that many video surfaces that people have to perform on would give me an aneurysm. That's an insane amount of panels to both maintain, not just that, like the article said, alignment is a real problem that needs to be dealt with. The fact that they also only get 1 actual run thru with show conditions, which is the actual show itself, that alone, regardless of the fact that millions of people are watching, like that's crazy. I'm always astonished at the sheer amount of thinking that goes into the Super Bowl halftime show. It has got to be so nerve-racking to make sure so many things happen correctly the first (and only) time, with millions of viewers, and 100s of millions of dollars at stake. I will gladly let others deal with that, cause if something goes wrong, everyone is gonna see it.
This year’s half time show was pretty cool, and this is the first time I’ve ever read about or seen how it was produced. It’s interesting to learn about how they did it and the challenges they encountered. The way it’s described makes it sound easy, and to All Access it probably was, this year. I was surprised to hear that Tribe Inc only had a single CAD person in the process (at least that’s how the article made it sound). I can’t imagine how many drawings would be associated with a such an important show of this scale; it seems like they would have a draft of every piece of hardware that’s going into it. I’m surprised that they weren’t able to rehearse with the grass at all. It must’ve been a huge challenge for the team to overcome, and it was probably nerve-wracking for them watching it go out during the real thing.
It was interesting to see the model they used to plan out how moving into and out of the space was going to go, but I'm frustrated that they didn't mention the wobble of the stage at the very end, when everyone was super high energy. I wanted to see if this was accounted for, and how that 6 inch deflection came to pass, as well as if it was even caught in a technical rehearsal. When the part with the bending stage came on TV I nearly had a heart attack. I wonder if everyone, or anyone at all for that matter, was fired. In the article they did talk about the LED panel deflection, which created a bunch of dead pixels, and how they accounted for it with a seam alignment method. I'm not sure how aligning the seams led to it killing less pixels, but I figure it has to do with the internals of the circuitry.
I have read these articles in previous years but this was the first year I read it and really understood what it was talking about. I don’t know why but I guess I expected the model of the stage to be I don’t know like flashier and more complex looking. Another thing I was not expecting was the fact that they did not get to rehearse any of it on the grass until the show. That seems like too large of a show to risk not knowing how it is going to respond on the grass. I also remember in class we were talking about how if the contracts state that if the turf is damaged they do not get paid for their work and that just adds to the pressure of not being able to rehearse or test the elements on the real grass. It looked beautiful during the show but I would not want to watch it as someone working on it.
Something that makes the stage and lighting design for the Super Bowl interesting to me is the very challenging circumstances that the production has to happen in, while still having to look fully professional. The Superbowl halftime show is one of the most-watched television events of the year and is expected to be able to blow away audiences. This is made difficult by the fact that it has to happen during the middle of a football game. The two most notable difficulties are the fact that the show has to load in in an extraordinarily short amount of time and that there has to be no impact whatsoever on the soft, grass field. I do wonder how they bond the various stage decks together once they have gone into position, such that there is no relative motion between the platforms. I am also curious what caused the visible bouncing which can be seen in the recording of the performance.
I liked this half time show article from Live Design better than the other half time article from Live Design that I read earlier for news quiz. I felt like this article was really interesting and provided a more interesting, in my opinion, look into the collaboration and problem solving of the half time show. The other article talked about all of the different companies that worked to produce the half time show but I liked how this article specified what each group did. It was cool to read them talking about the exchanging of drafting and that they built everything in 37 days. It was also interesting to learn that they weren't able to test show conditions until the actual performance. Overall, I really enjoyed reading about the design process of the half time show and the collaborative nature that it holds between all of the companies that work together to produce it.
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