Fans at Coachella 2012 and fans viewing from home, were shocked when a hologram of Tupac Shakur appeared on stage to perform “Hail Mary” and “2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted” with Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre.
Nick Smith, president of hologram creation company AV Concepts, explained how the collaboration with Dr. Dre came to be..
Read what he had to say below:
“We worked with Dr. Dre on this and it was Dre’s vision to bring this back to life. It was his idea from the very beginning and we worked with him and his camp to utilize the technology to make it come to life.”
Smith said he wasn’t allowed to talk about the creative aspects of the production — including how the hologram was able to seemingly perform the set in synch with Snoop and whether all the vocals were ‘Tupac’s — but he did say that his company has the ability to recreate long-dead figures and visually recreate them in the studio. “You can take their likenesses and voice and … take people that haven’t done concerts before or perform music they haven’t sung and digitally recreate it,” he said.
The hologram was the latest visual magic pulled off by AV, which is also behind the 2005 Grammy’s performance featuring Madonna and the holographic members of the Gorillaz, as well as holograms used in concert by Celine Dion and the Black Eyed Peas.
The Tupac hologram was several months in the planning and took nearly four months to create in a studio and though Smith was not able to reveal the exact price tag for the illusion, he said a comparable one could cost anywhere from $100,000 to more than $400,000 to pull off. “I can’t say how much that event cost, but I can say it’s affordable in the sense that if we had to bring entertainers around world and create concerts across the country, we could put artists in every venue in the country” he said.
