Behind the Making of Dead & Company’s Spectacular Sphere Visuals – MASHAHER

If you like what you see when you check into Las Vegas’ Sphere for the residency by Dead & Company — and most attendees have come away raving, Deadheads and newbies alike — you can credit much of that to the efforts of Treatment Studio, the creative agency charged with executing the visuals for the venue’s 160,000- square-foot wrap-around screen for the three-month run. Treatment’s Sam Pattinson is the show’s executive producer but, above and beyond that, shares creative director credit with Dead & Company band member John Mayer, after a decade’s worth of collaborations with Mayer on the singer-guitarist’s solo tours.

Putting together the design for Dead & Company’s residency has been a short, not-so-strange trip. Pattinson, who co-founded Treatment with Willie Williams, U2’s longtime creative director, says that putting the visuals together was a smooth process, even though they had just six months from start to finish to make it work. (“Finish” may be a misnomer, since Mayer previously told Variety — and Pattinson confirms — that new video pieces will be added even as late as the last couple of weeks of the residency in August. The group plays its final night there, at least for 2024, on Aug. 10.)

After previously catching up with group members Mayer, Bob Weir and Mickey Hart for interviews about the engagement, Variety spoke with Pattinson about what went in to the eye-tickling show. “I think a lot of the portals that we made, even though they’re relatively simple ideas and looks, are very effective,” he says, “with that perspective thing where we trick people into believing what they’re looking at, which is great. There also is just a sort of fun fair ride to it — the rollercoaster ride through the different tunnels and things like that. It is nice to see a real joy in the fans’ reaction to all of those moments.” 

You guys had already done U2 at Sphere, and you have a longstanding relationship with John Mayer. So without one or both of those antecedents in play, is it fair to say Dead & Company might might’ve been considerably more difficult to pull off?

Absolutely. 

How long did you actually have to pull it off before opening night in May? 

John led the creative; this show you’ll see is very close to his initial concept and direction. And we really started that conversation in November last year — which, compared to U2, is quite late. But because we learned so much on U2 about the space and rendering, and we equipped ourselves and gained that experience and knowledge, it meant we could do Dead & Company sooner. With the U2 process, a lot of that time was spent on technical research and development and decision-making, which meant we didn’t have to do that on Dead & Company. All the time we spent on the show was really just on creative and production.

But I think a lot of artists are going to have to adapt to a different approach to production if they’re working in the Sphere, because if they have the perspective on video content production that it can be very fast turnaround and late in the day decision-making wise, you just can’t afford to do that in the Sphere. The rendering alone is enormous, and with the whole workflow in the chain to get anything up on the screen and delivered and signed off, you just need to allow more time. … And when we render something on screen here, we look at it, check, it’s all fine. You put it up on the Sphere and they’ve just got howling render errors that you can’t see here; of course they’re 50 times higher, so they jump out a bit. 

What were your biggest challenges, either from a production standpoint or a creative standpoint?

The interesting thing about working with Dead & Company is, being the band that they are, there’s no set times on songs. On a couple, there are, but they play for as long as they need to, which means that we have to accommodate that in terms of the video content. So they might play a song one night for eight minutes, the next night for 12. And we have to make sure that our work stays out there and doesn’t get repetitive or boring over longer periods.

Conventionally on a tour, you have one song with one piece of content, and it’s often locked to the click track. What I found really exciting about this is that we will start a song with one piece of content and then we’ll go over to another piece of content with a different feel entirely [on a subsequent night], and then a third one sometimes. Obviously it’s very considered; it’s not just thrown in there. We find a segue and a connection between very different aesthetics. I’ve never really seen that on tour before or in live shows, but it’s worked really well. 

Do you just come up with these pieces and then it’s up to John Mayer or the band to think more about which will go with which songs, or are you already thinking in the content creation process that there is a specific set of songs a visual piece could go with?

You’re quite right that the video content works with lots of different songs and, again, they need that flexibility. There’s a few things that are more uptempo, which will only work with a faster song. … We get a set list, in good time but not a huge amount of time before the show. We can just allocate where the different pieces of content are gonna go, and so we decide what it is. And it really moves around a lot. We do have certain things as bookends that stay the same every show. But there’s a real desire to refresh the show for the fans as much as possible, and especially the fans that are going to multiple shows over a weekend, so they’ll see something new.

Our brief was originally that we wanted to create between 30-40% extra content (beyond what would fit in a show in a given night), so we could mix it up all the time. And then along the way, we with huge shifts in color changing palette and stuff like that, that we could adapt and create different versions of the content, and that gave us more choices to allocate.  I think it’s a really eclectic show, and it’s an eclectic body of music and content. But there is a real cohesion to the thing night after night. You never really get a sense of like, “Oh, we’re playing this over the wrong song,” or “That’s an embarrassment; that’s not quite right.” I think as well that it says a lot about the fans, that they are really open-minded.

How much visual content did you create, in the end?

I think we made about five and a half hours in the end. So we beat the 40% (extra goal) on the three-hour show. It’s a huge body of work, really.

I saw the first two nights, and in seeing that there was additional visual material being added even on the second night, I wondered whether that was a desire to hold things back, or whether there might’ve even been some stuff that was not actually done by deadline. Did you just have that liberty to pull things in and out, or was there any element of still finishing things at the last minute? 

It was a combination of both. We had more ideas than we could get into all the shows in the first few weeks. And then certain things weren’t quite finished; they just needed more time and development. The great thing about this client and show is that that wasn’t a problem, if it was on the minimal side of stuff. Because when we did get round to finishing the piece and getting it programmed, it was a new offering (for returning fans). So there was no pressure on that, and it was really great of them to sort of see it that way. Often you get a lot of pressure when things like that  happen. But, no, on the whole, we had much more content than we really needed for those first few weekends. We continued to add new looks throughout, and we will continue to. 

John Mayer said in his interview with us that he wanted to have fresh stuff even at the final weekends in August, for the people who came early on and are coming back.

Yeah, we’ve been typically ambitious — I think probably a little bit too ambitious for Julu and August! — but it’s great. On top of having more content than we could really program initially, John and the team had so many good ideas that we had an excess of concepts, which is unusual. It’s usually very difficult to sort of fill a set, and I think it says a lot about John and the creative process and how the artists are very open-minded and supportive. I know this sounds like a terrible vendor grovel, but it is really true. It’s a very constructive, positive, easy process. I mean, it’s hard work, but creatively it’s a great conversation.

You just worked with John on his solo tour. I didn’t see it, but from photos, it looks like the visuals on that show were more abstract across the board.Of course, this Dead show has abstract stuff too, but it also has a lot of very big, easily describable, high-concept set pieces that are designed to command your attention on their own.

Yeah, it does. It has got a different feel. I don’t think people really understand how good John is. And again, it sounds like a vendor grovel, but just bear with me. People don’t understand how good he is visually, and his reference and his knowledge of art and design and culture is really broad and deep. So he has always got an interest or a direction, and often that’s led or inspired by the album or music he’s doing. The shows we’ve done with him, they tend to be a bit more sort of higher design or a different culture than what we’ve done with Dead & Company. But there’s plenty of humor in those shows and goofy stuff, too. You know, he references some really funny things from his childhood, and they end up in there, so it doesn’t become sort of too highbrow.  

How far back do you go with John, working with him?

I didn’t meet John at the time, but I was working with the Rolling Stones on their 50th anniversary shows, and we did a show in Jersey and John guested on that. He saw our work on that show and they got in touch and asked us to help on the “Born and Raised” tour in 2013, so that was our first time working for him. There was a real filter for that album, which filtered through to the show design and video content. It’s always been a good process working with him and his team.

Let’s talk about the bookends of this show, which are not a secret for anybody coming at this point, beginning and ending with Haight Asbury and going into space in-between. Was that John’s concept, how the show begins and ends, or did it come about through collaboration? Also, Industrial Light & Magic worked on that, and you’d also worked with ILM on U2 at Sphere. Can you talk about how that those setpieces came together? 

Yeah, but I’m gonna be cryptic about the detail, just in case. That was 100% John’s idea. His concept of the show is this journey, and we find different ways to travel to different times and places and worlds. And we start off with this relevant location, and then we take off and go into outer space and start our journey through this universe of Grateful Dead and Dead and Company, and then we return to this place at a different time, which is the perfect bookend. It’s got such a beautiful narrative to it. That idea did not change; from the first time he told us, that’s what you see in the show.

Now, in terms of ILM, my partner Willie (Williams) and producer Lizzie Pocock had a really good experience working with them on “Atomic City,” which is a fantastic piece of content [in U2’s Sphere show]. So it was a sort of a no-brainer to ask ’em to help on Dead & Co., and the ambition of the piece that they made — well, the two pieces they made — went beyond. We could have done a version of it ourselves, but it’s just really beyond us, and they nailed it — it’s absolutely their world and their comfort zone. They needed a certain amount of time and a certain amount of budget, but they made this incredibly detailed piece of content, and it is just breathtaking, isn’t it?

With the U2 show, they brought in a lot of different creators, producers, and recognized visual artists for some of the visual pieces. Was there a similar approach on this, or was it much more uniform in how the things came together? 

It was more of an in-house treatment. Then obviously we’ve got our freelance people that we use, who are very experienced and work on a lot of shows we do. With other bands, when we do commission other people, we’re really inviting new concepts, new ideas and new aesthetics to the show.  We did the same on Elton John for the Farewell Tour; we commissioned a lot of artists for that. But I think (for Dead & Company) because we were so solid in our concepts of what the show and the content could be, there wasn’t really the need to go out of house and invite an artist who did a particular kind of work or had a certain feel to their work. So because of that, we kept it more in-house.

Also, you know, with the commissions, ILM are brilliant, and they’ve got the render power and they’re organized, and they’ve got their parameters, but they absolutely can do it. A lot of other artists would struggle with that render time and resolution. So that’s always another consideration when you’re putting that work out is: Can the person actually do it?  So most was with our own house team. We’ve got the design directors, Damian Hale and Tim Booth and Sam Munnings, responsible for a lot of the work. One thing we did commission out-of-house was from a London company called Art & Graft, and a guy called Mike Mploney. They do animation and they do a lot of work for Apple and other people, and they had the right aesthetic for one of the pieces that John had asked for, where we created this landscape that the band performed in. We’re good at bringing people into this who haven’t done it before. But yeah, it was definitely less about bringing in the established artists to the Dead show. 

Anything you could tell us about the “Drums/Space” segment? We talked with Mickey Hart about that. Until then, I had not realized first that those were actually his own percussion instruments that had been rendered to float around the ceiling of the dome during that long percussive segment. And it becomes a very intense audio/visual experience, with the sound coming through the seats. John reiterated that Mickey was really responsible for the conception of that part of the show.

It very clear that they wanted three versions (of the “Drums” visuals); he did a different version each weekend night. So we worked with that. I was really interested in kaleidoscopes and trying to sort of separate them and put them in a 3D space. We tried it through After Effects in Cinema 4D, and it didn’t really get there. So we worked with a guy called Brett Bolton, who works in Notch, a very useful bit of software which is real-time render and manipulation, and then you can generate animation and do great camera effects on it. I asked Brett to look at the kaleidoscopes with the content ideas that Mickey had, and he just created this incredible experience.

It’s real time, because it’s audio reactive. Plus, Mickey’s performance is so energized on that scale — it just worked really well. It’s a very different moment in the show, for the audience, but they really enjoy it. They stuck with it. Then alongside that, Mickey had asked whether we could scan his drum collection. I think he’s got over a thousand drums. We didn’t do all of those, but we scanned about 80 of them — extraordinary instruments and items and objects. We did photogrammetry on them, and then gave that to Brett and then he created this animation with these drums flying around in space. Again, they’re audio reactive, so as he’s hitting those drums, they’re lighting up and they’re all rhythmic.

Speaking of that, in an interview we did with Bob Weir, he talked about wanting to return to Sphere for a future engagement and make more use of the technology he feels is advancing. He was talking about wanting to do more spontaneous, improvisational visuals that are accomplished live. His comparison was Ken Kesey’s Acid Test multi-media show in the ‘60s, which had rudimentary live projections. Do you think there is room to have it become more improvisational, in the way Weir is thinking, if you do it again? 

Yeah, I think so, because that’s what Brett is doing for Mickey. Mickey’s section is very live the whole way, reacting to music or being manipulated live by Brett himself. And I think that that will begin to potentially rub off on other areas.

Any other big things you are working on this year, outside of Sphere? 

We’re doing the Adele shows in Munich in August, which is a very large-scale project from our perspective — a very exciting one, and we’ve got a history. I first worked with Adele in 2011, and we did the tour for her in 2016 and then did the Colosseum show (at Caesars Palace) in 2022 — the second version that made it. Now we’re working on the Munich shows, so that’s all keeping us very busy. We’ve got a few things lined up for later in the year and next year which I’m not allowed to talk about.

So Adele’s Munich engagement conceptually is pretty different from what she was doing in Las Vegas? 

Yeah, it’s a very different kind of show. I mean, I can’t go into detail at all, but both shows are or were really ambitious and very full. I’m not sure how much I can really say about it without getting in trouble, to be honest.

Since you’d worked with Adele so much before, there had to be a comfort level when you went in to work with her in Las Vegas, but there also must have been some pressure, since you were following on the heels of something she had famously deemed as not working. The fact that that was pulled off so well to her satisfaction and the audience’s satisfaction seemed like a big triumph. 

It was, and they did really well to sort of bounce back from what they’d been in before, which is really unfortunate. But it was really clear what the show they wanted was, I think, and it was easy to be decisive and get on with it. It was led very well by Matt Askem, who’s a creative director and camera director, who’s also doing Munich, so it is very easy to work under Matt. It was (substantial) for them to really turn that around, and it wasn’t a huge amount of time, and it was a very ambitious show.

Even from the video surfaces, from the projection surface that was LED, we had 238 million pixels per frame. And I think the Sphere is 273 million per frame. The difference with the Colosseum shows is that you didn’t see all of that surface all the time, because there were things sliding in and out and different bits of video being used, but nonetheless, it was a really significant resolution, which is an indication of the scale of the production and the design.

Having been involved with two Sphere experiences now as a company, with the customer reaction being fairly ecstatic, does that make you want to do more at Sphere?

Absolutely, yeah. It’s been great working with their team and the whole setup there. For such a challenging process, it’s a very pleasant, comfortable place to work, and we’re well looked after, so there’s nothing about working at the Sphere that we don’t like. And there’s so much more we can do with that canvas, I think — and not just us, but that a lot of people will do. I think we we’re just beginning to see its potential, and I think as new people come in and start doing shows, it’s gonna just grow and we’re gonna see more and more. So we hope to be there again soon and look forward to it.