Halloween is just behind us, but there may be plenty of goblins ahead. I’ve written before, here and elsewhere, about that moment of frisson when, at the 2012 Coachella festival, the audience was stunned by the reunion of deceased rapper Tupac Shakur with a very alive Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg during a performance on stage.
It was billed as a holographic representation of Shakur — suggesting a three-dimensional projection. In actuality, it was a two-dimensional reflection, on a stretched piece of Mylar, reflecting a video projecting from below the stage, out of the audience’s field of view. It was a slick updating of a theatrical gag that’s been around since President Lincoln went to see Our American Cousin, and owes its basic mechanics to a Victorian-era optical illusion called Pepper’s Ghost, invented by an English scientist and introduced into theaters in the 1860’s.
Nonetheless, the Tupac appearance was effective, in part because the company putting it on, San Diego-based AV Concepts, took pains to present it with a lot of detail. Using Eyeliner 3D holographic projection technology developed by London-based Musion, a body double’s moves were motion-captured to HD video and the slain rapper’s features, including his tattoos, were digitally applied to that recording, which was then manipulated to synch with Shakur’s archived voice recordings.
But here’s the real kicker to that momentous occasion: At the time, it seemed as if the entertainment world was about to be bombarded with “ghosts” — celebrities like rock stars reanimated through technology and sent out on tour. But it never happened. I asked Nick Smith, AV Concepts’ president, why, three years on, we haven’t seen a parade of zombies on tour. He was as confounded as I was. He noted that it wasn’t a simple proposition — at Coachella, he says, they had to go so far as to check the phase of the moon the night of the show, to know exactly what the level of illumination around the stage would be. On the other hand, one version or another of the gag has been pulled off successfully for two centuries.
Ladies & Gentlemen, Put Your Hands Together For…
Now, reanimation may finally be getting some major backing. Having acquired the Musion patents, Hologram USA, run by billionaire Alki David, heir to a Greek industrial empire, plans to put some of music’s late icons back out on the road, starting with Whitney Houston, who died in 2012, and with plans for subsequent outings for artists including Ray Charles, Richard Pryor, Jim Morrison and Liberace. Published reports indicate that David has invested as much as $20 million into the project, and has been aggressively defending that patent in court, suing, among others, Fox and Cirque de Soleil for infringing it.
These performances will likely be more like residencies at various venues; David has told reporters that he has commitments from the Apollo Theater in Harlem, the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut, the Andy Williams Moon River Theatre in Branson, MO and the Saban Theatre in Los Angeles. That strategy lets the producers have better control over the performance environment and make the illusion as seamless as possible. As Nick Smith pointed out, Pepper’s Ghost may be a bit of a parlor trick, but it’s one that requires careful execution. He recalled how, at Coachella, no one predicted how the effect of the massive rolling waves of low-frequency thump that comes with a hip-hop show would affect the illusion. “When the Mylar is stretched out across the stage, it’s like a snare drum,” he told me. “The bass can really rattle it.”
But as important as the visuals are to this kind of show, most of those targeted for reanimation were musicians, so the sound is just as critical, and the question becomes, how do you mic a ghost? (Insert punch line here.) In search of an answer to that question, what I got were several promises to supply information, but unlike Tupac, none ever materialized. Absent any other input, it suggests that imagery may be easier to obtain the rights to than the audio, which requires licensing of sound recordings and publishing rights strewn possibly across many entities.
Will It Work?
Technical aspects aside, will this venture succeed financially? While the Tupac event is still widely talked about — the video of his “appearance” racked up 15 million YouTube views within 48 hours and hundreds of millions more since — it’s telling that no one has successfully picked up this baton in the meantime. An announcement in 2012 by several of the parties involved in the Tupac/Coachella event to produce a series of virtual Elvis likenesses fizzled. There are technical challenges, but if anything, the technology’s gotten better in recent years. And it’s been established that dead celebrities can continue generating revenue for their estates for decades after their deaths — Elvis Presley has an estimated net worth of $300 million and Michael Jackson is worth twice that, according to estimates, with much of that earned after their passings.
On the other hand, music ventures tend to suffer under the management of hedge-fund types. Look at what’s become of EDM after Robert Sillerman took much of an entire genre public, with a share price going from nearly $12 at the open in October, 2013 to less than 50 cents earlier this year after a failed privatization bid. British private-equity mogul Guy Hands took over the prestigious EMI record label in 2007 and, in four years, ran up a staggering debt load of £2.5 billion ($3.87 billion).
It remains to be seen how Alki David’s attempt to bring back the dead will fare. But it will be one more challenge and one more avenue of work for live-sound professionals. And just think: no backtalk from the star on this tour.
