Live Design Online: Puerto Rican superstar and Grammy-winner Bad Bunny took center stage at the Super Bowl LX Apple Music Halftime Show, broadcast live on February 8, 2026 on NBC from Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California, which is the home stadium of the San Francisco 49ers. The show was also streamed on Peacock.
3 comments:
I find it to be an incredibly unique and interesting challenge to try to light the superbowl half time show. You are in a football stadium, which yes concerts do make it work, but they can get trusses wherever they want. You do not have time to do a full lighting load in during the 10 minutes of set up time to get the half time show up and ready to begin, so you have to make it last the entire game, with the potential for football players to hit lights with the ball and such. They also had to perform while it was around 5pm, which is before sunset. Yes, you aren’t getting that 12pm light, but still you are getting a good amount of daylight, which makes some interesting challenge as you are losing a lot of potential lighting elements, and have a very limited selection of what you can use.
This was an awesome article! I actually have been a fan of these for years! My high school theatre teacher introduced them to me. You can see the light plots for all of the recent years! Many of the recent Superbowls have had awesome designs to go along with their amazing headliners. I think that this Superbowl posed many challenges that they did not face last year. This Superbowl was held in Levi’s Stadium, which is an outdoor venue in San Francisco, California. This means that it was still light outside during the halftime show. That made it 10 times harder to light it. There was just so much ambient light, that the lighting and video design was not able to add the punch of vibrancy that would have been amazing! I think Bad Bunny’s performance and the design was great, however I do think that an extra punch of color would have been nice. As I stated this would only really be possible if it was held in a dome like last year's Superbowl in New Orleans.
This was really cool to see! I really enjoy looking at the drafting for large scale shows like the Super Bowl Halftime show and large scale concert tours. It really offers a lot of insight into how the designers are thinking about stadium spaces differently than theatrical ones. Also, how the designers had to think about light in a different way given that it was a West Coast Superbowl, therefore forcing the halftime show into daylight. Overall this year’s superbowl design was really superb. I was not really impressed by last year’s super bowl, not because of the creative concepts that went into it, but because of how they executed it. The giant white tarp looked like a giant white tarp, go figure. This year included a lot more realistic scenic elements and set electrics, which to me created a much better experience for the audience on the live broadcast.
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