Sphere
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Sphere Entertainment has said it’s committed to working with alternative “forward-thinking cities around the world” after officially withdrawing plans to build a Sphere concert arena in London.
On Monday (Jan. 8), Sphere Entertainment’s sister company, Madison Square Garden Entertainment (MSGE), which is owned by tycoon James Dolan, told British officials that it would not be proceeding with its long-standing proposal to build a Sphere venue in the British capital city.
The announcement came less than two months after London Mayor Sadiq Khan blocked plans for the 21,500-capacity, 300-foot-tall spherical building because of the impact he believed it would have on the surrounding area, including high energy use and the “significant light intrusion” it would cause local residents.
In a letter to the planning inspectorate seen by Billboard, Richard Constable, MSGE’s executive vp/global head of government affairs and social impact, told officials that “following careful review, we cannot continue to participate in a process that is merely a political football between rival parties.”
“It is extremely disappointing that Londoners will not benefit from the Sphere’s groundbreaking technology and the thousands of well-paying jobs it would have created,” wrote Constable, confirming that MSGE — acting on behalf of Sphere Entertainment — was officially withdrawing its application from the planning process.
The termination of MSGE’s plans for a London version of its $2 billion Sphere venue in Las Vegas follows years of controversy surrounding the project, which was due to be built on a five-acre plot of land in Stratford, East London (the site has been largely derelict since 2012 when it was used as a temporary coach park during the London Olympics).
A proposal for what was later christened MSG Sphere London was first submitted in 2019, but it immediately received strong opposition from local councillors and campaign groups, as well as AEG, the owner and operator of the 20,000-capacity The O2 arena located less than five miles away.
Despite residents’ concerns, The London Legacy Development Company provisionally greenlit the plans in March 2022 before they were subsequently overturned by Mayor Khan last November.
In a statement, Sphere Entertainment said it had informed Michael Gove — the U.K. secretary of state for levelling up, housing and communities, who initiated a review of the mayor’s decision in December — that it would not be moving forward with its plans for London and would not be participating in a review.
“We are committed to continuing to work collaboratively with forward-thinking cities around the world who are serious about bringing this next-generation entertainment experience to their communities,” said a spokesperson for Sphere Entertainment.
Sphere Entertainment Co., formerly Madison Square Garden Entertainment (MSGE), was formed in April when MSGE’s traditional live entertainment business, which includes the Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall venues in New York, split off from the Sphere and MSG Networks businesses. Sphere retained a 33% stake in MSGE.
The five-acre site earmarked for the London Sphere, which MSGE bought for around £60 million ($76 million), is now expected to be put up for sale.
Meanwhile, the developer is understood to be in talks with multiple international markets about rolling out the Sphere model in other global cities, following its high-grossing debut in Las Vegas last year with a residency by U2.
In December, the New York Post reported that Dolan was meeting with investors in Abu Dhabi about building a second Sphere in the United Arab Emirates capital. Also last year, several South Korean newspapers reported that the city of Hanam was another potential future location after talks took place between city officials and representatives of MSGE. Sphere Entertainment Co. declined to comment on those reports when contacted by Billboard.
Sphere Entertainment Co. has promoted Ed Lunger to senior vp/GM of Sphere, the groundbreaking venue that opened in Las Vegas last September.
After previously serving as Sphere’s vp/assistant BM of back of house operations, Lunger will now oversee building operations, event production, technical operations, guest services, food and beverage, merchandise operations and ticket operations. He will also work across the Sphere organization to develop, execute and support strategic plans aligned with the venue’s overall business objectives.
“Being part of the Sphere team opening this next-generation venue has been an honor, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to now lead our venue operations team in this new role,” Lunger said in a statement. “Sphere is setting a new standard for the in-venue guest experience, and I look forward to working with my colleagues across the organization as we continue to deliver unforgettable moments for our guests right here in Las Vegas.”
“I am pleased that Ed has taken on a new leadership role with Sphere,” added Rich Claffey, Sphere’s executive vp/COO. “Since its opening, Sphere has been delivering a first-of-its-kind experience to guests. With his deep expertise in venue management and operations, including at other venues in the MSG Family of Companies, Ed will ensure that Sphere is well positioned to continue building on our world-class experience.”
Lunger is based in Las Vegas and has been on Sphere’s venue leadership team since 2020. He previously spent seven years on the venue operation team at the Forum in Inglewood, Calif., and also worked in various venue operations and engineering roles at Madison Square Garden.
Sphere opened to much fanfare in September with a residency from U2. In December, Billboard Boxscore reported that the band’s 17-show run at Sphere generated nearly $110 million in ticket sales; a Securities and Exchange Commission filing from Dec. 5 notes that those shows generated a total of $30.7 million in revenue for Sphere Entertainment through Nov. 30. Meanwhile, Sphere Entertainment’s own content offering, Darren Aronofsky’s Postcard from Earth, generated approximately $44.5 million in total revenue from ticket sales from 111 showings.
U2‘s residency has been extended multiple times, with the final shows slated for May. Phish will play its own four-show Sphere residency this April.
Sphere Entertainment provided the first inside glimpse at the finances of James Dolan‘s $2 billion Sphere project in Las Vegas in a new Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Tuesday (Dec. 5).
Spun off from Madison Square Garden Entertainment in April and now trading on the NYSE as SPHR, the company is expected to report positive adjusted income this quarter thanks to the opening of the venue and a successful run of shows including U2:UV’s Achtung Baby Live At Sphere.
According to Billboard Boxscore, U2‘s 17-show run beginning in September at Sphere generated nearly $110 million in ticket sales. The SEC filing notes that those shows generated a total of $30.7 million in revenue for Sphere Entertainment through Nov. 30. Meanwhile, Sphere Entertainment’s own content offering, Darren Aronofsky’s Postcard from Earth, has generated approximately $44.5 million in total revenue from ticket sales from 111 showings.
U2 played its first show at Sphere on Sept. 29, 2023, kicking off a multi-month run at the venue. Due to the strong demand, 15 more shows have been added in January, February and March 2024, bringing the band’s planned number of performances to 40.
Also in the SEC filing, the company announced plans to raise money through the sale of $225 million in convertible senior notes that are due to mature in 2028, as well as the option for purchasers to buy an additional $33.75 million in notes.
Sphere Entertainment plans to use a portion of the proceeds from the notes sale to fund capped call transactions designed to reduce the potential dilution of its common stock from the conversion of debt into equity. The remainder of the net proceeds will be used for general corporate purposes, including capital for Sphere-related growth initiatives, according to a release announcing the offering. The initial conversion rate, interest rate and certain other terms of the notes will be negotiated between Sphere Entertainment and the initial purchasers.
Sphere Entertainment began the quarter (starting Sept. 30) with $433.5 million in cash on hand, with $123 million coming from advance ticket sales. The principal balance of the company’s total debt at the beginning of the quarter was approximately $1.2 billion, including $932.3 million of debt under the MSGN Credit Facilities. Under the terms of the MSGN deal, $103.1 million in required quarterly amortization payments are due between Sept. 30, 2023, and Oct. 11, 2024.
Shares of Sphere Entertainment dropped nearly 20% in trading after the company announced the debt offering, but bounced back slightly and were down 15.5% to $28.41 at the market’s close.
Phish are the next major act booked to play Las Vegas’ eye-popping Sphere venue. The band announced on Thursday (Nov. 30) that they will do a four-show run at the building from April 18-21, 2024, with each night set to feature a unique setlist and visuals. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See […]
London Mayor Sadiq Khan has rejected Madison Square Garden’s long-standing proposal to build a Sphere arena in London, less than two months after the company debuted its first Sphere project to critical acclaim in Las Vegas.
News of the rejection came by way of a letter from Khan to Anthony Hollingsworth, director of the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC), which oversees London’s Olympic Park properties. On Nov. 6, Hollingsworth had written to Khan to inform him that “the local planning authority is minded to grant planning permission” for the Sphere project. In the letter dated Monday (Nov. 20), Khan explained to Hollingworth that after considering a 111-page report commissioned by the Greater London Authority (GLA) advising the mayor to reject the plan, he was now ordering the LLDC to “refuse planning permission” for the venue.
A statement from Madison Square Garden Entertainment officials said they were “disappointed in London’s decision” but added, “There are many forward-thinking cities that are eager to bring this technology to their communities. We will concentrate on those.”
A proposal for the venue was submitted in 2018, and Sphere London initially survived key votes by the city’s local planning authority. But with his letter, Khan has seemingly doomed the project.
The mayor said his main reason for rejecting the proposal was the impact he believed the venue would have on the surrounding area, writing that Sphere would “cause significant light intrusion resulting in significant harm to the outlook of neighbouring properties.”
He also said the size of the venue — 300 feet high and 400 feet wide — “would result in a bulky, unduly dominant” facility” that failed “to respect the character and appearance of this part of the town centre and the site’s wider setting.” Lastly, he criticized the venue’s high “energy intensive use,” which he says “does not achieve a high sustainability standard, and does not constitute good and sustainable design.”
“GLA officers have concluded that to grant permission would be contrary to the Development Plan,” adds Khan in the letter, citing a document that lays out the spatial development strategy in London for the next 20 to 25 years. “[It] would prejudice the implementation of the policies within the Development Plan relating to residential amenity, good design, and the conservation and enhancement of London’s heritage.”
The Sphere project had previously faced pushback from some local residents as well as AEG, which operates London’s O2 Arena, located just four miles from the proposed site of the venue. In January, after the London Legacy Development Corporation’s Planning Decisions Committee greenlit MSG Entertainment to initiate work on the project, AEG called on Khan to reject the project in a statement that read in part: “The advertising façade is at a wholly unprecedented scale for London and totally out of keeping with the surrounding area. The design was conceived for the heart of Las Vegas and has been transposed onto this east London site: it’s the wrong design, in the wrong location.”
Sphere, the stunning venue that has transformed the Las Vegas skyline and redefined the concert-going experience, generated $4.1 million from U2’s first two concerts in September, its owner, Sphere Entertainment Co., reported in its quarterly earnings release on Wednesday (Nov. 8).
The $2.3 billion Sphere is a 366-foot tall, 516-foot wide spherical venue with a wrap-around video screen that envelopes a seated audience of 17,600. Sphere’s external skin — called Exosphere — is covered in 580,000 square feet of programmable LED exterior lights that advertises the venue’s technological capabilities.
Sphere also made $2.6 million in additional revenue, primarily from advertising on the Exosphere that began in September.
With only two concerts under its belt through the end of September, Sphere’s earnings release was about the venue’s potential, not its revenue to date. “Our journey with Sphere is just beginning,” said executive chairman/CEO James Dolan during Wednesday’s earnings call. “And while it will take some time for Sphere to realize its full potential, we’re off to a great start.”
U2’s original 25-show residency has been extended by an additional 11 shows that will occur in January and February 2024. The company expects to host two additional residencies in the second half of the fiscal year that ends June 30, 2024, according to Dolan. “We’re having conversations with artists across a wide variety of genres, including discussing runs of varying lengths,” he said.
Sphere had an adjusted operating loss of $83.1 million in the quarter, an increase of $19 million from the prior-year period. It also had $2.8 million of venue operating expenses in the quarter and $2.2 million of event-related expenses. An additional $2.1 million in advertising costs were related to the Oct. 6 launch of The Sphere Experience featuring the film Postcard from Earth by Darren Aronofsky. Selling, general and administrative expenses amounted to $84.2 million.
The Las Vegas venue is the first of what Sphere Entertainment expects to be multiple Sphere venues. Dolan was light on specifics but said there is “a great deal of interest and substantive discussions” in several additional markets. “I will say that it does look like Sphere will be a global brand,” he said, “and so we should expect the expansion globally rather than just in the U.S.”
Sphere Entertainment had total revenue of $118 million in its fiscal first quarter ended September 30, down 4% from the prior-year period. MSG Networks contributed $110.2 million of revenue, down 10% year over year. MSG Networks, which operates two regional sports networks, joined Sphere following a spin-off of MSG Entertainment in April. That same month, Sphere reached an agreement to sell its stake in Tao Group Hospitality to global luxury lifestyle company Mohari Hospitality for about $300 million.
Shares of Sphere Entertainment fell as much as 8.4% to $30.58 on Wednesday morning before recovering to $31.90, down 4.4%, by mid-afternoon. The stock price took a bigger hit on Monday, however, dropping 9.6% following the company’s announcement late on Friday that CFO Gautam Ranji had left the company. Dolan attributed Ranji’s departure to Sphere being a new type of business. “It’s pretty challenging,” he said. “I think we both came to the conclusion that it probably wasn’t a great fit.”
Financial metrics for the first fiscal quarter:
Total revenue of $118 million, down 4% year over year.
Adjusted operating loss of $57.9 million, up 88% year over year.
Net income of $66.4 million, up from a $44 million net loss in the prior-year period.
Sphere revenue of $7.8 million.
Sphere event-related revenue of $4.1 million.
MSG Networks revenue of $110.2 million, down 10% year over year.
Sphere Entertainment Co. shares rose 11.1% to $41.99 on Monday (Oct. 2) — and reached a high of $43.59, up 17.3% from Friday’s closing price — after the world got its first glimpses of the revolutionary concert venue over the weekend. The $2.3 billion venue opened on Friday (Sept. 29) with the first of 25 […]
Music is only part of the audio-visual experience in U2:UV Achtung Baby Live At Sphere, the 25-date U2 residency that opened Sphere in Las Vegas on Sept. 29 and will run through December. For the show, creative directors Willie Williams and Es Devlin helped the band harness Sphere’s technological potential with immersive visuals, including pieces commissioned specifically for U2:UV and the innovative venue’s 160,000-square-foot LED screen.
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Among the creatives to work with the band was visual artist and filmmaker Marco Brambilla, whose eye-popping video collage “King Size” serves as the backdrop for “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” Achtung Baby‘s second track. For three decades, Brambilla, who began his career as a director, including of the 1993 sci-fi film Demolition Man, has created visual art pieces that grapple with subjects including media oversaturation, technology’s effects, and the nature of pop culture. In 2008, Brambilla began harvesting short loops of source material – clips of characters, landscapes, and backgrounds that were each one second or less – to make high-concept video collages that tackle “epic human themes, but interpreted in a way that’s very much about sensory overload in today’s media landscape,” he explains. After seeing one of his recent collages, “Heaven’s Gate,” at London’s immersive space Outernet Arts in early 2023, Williams reached out to Brambilla about becoming involved in U2:UV.
Brambilla’s no stranger to large-scale art installations – for one, Outernet bills itself as having “the world’s largest wrap-around screens” – but even so, Sphere’s unprecedented canvas offered new challenges and rewards. For Brambilla, whose rare musical collaborations include two operas with Marina Abramović and Kanye West’s 2010 “Power” music video, it also presented the opportunity to work with one of rock’s most visually daring artists – and on his favorite song off his favorite U2 album, no less.
“It’s fantastic, because Sphere is giving performers an opportunity to go into a space and be able to have visuals that you could never tour, without this technology and without the permanent installation of the LED screens,” Brambilla tells Billboard hours before leaving Paris for Sphere’s opening. “There’s all sorts of possibilities – and I think they’ve only scratched the surface.”
RICH FURY
How did you get connected with U2 and Sphere?
Willie went to see the [“Heaven’s Gate”] show and I got a call, and he asked if I would be interested in a commission for the residency that was coming up at Sphere. I had obviously heard about Sphere before and I became very interested very quickly, because the scale of the space and the technology was always really fascinating for me. From there, the only brief from them was really, “We want something really maximal, like, sensory overload.”
Then the concept of Elvis came up. The idea of the birth of Las Vegas and the death of Elvis became interconnected in my mind. I’d started watching a lot of Elvis films and doing a lot of research on his rise and fall. It seemed very prescient – it seemed like a really interesting commentary on what’s going on today. I put together the concept in a very short amount of time, it only took about a week. Then I started making the work.
Usually when I make a video collage I have scheduled anywhere between six months and a year. And in this case, I only had maybe three, three and a half months to make it. So it required a lot of new technology. I used a lot of AI to assist in making it and also to make versions of Elvis that would populate the canvas in AI.
How would you describe “King Size”?
It’s an upward scroll — the piece scrolls upwards from the desert. It starts in a very stylized, very theatrical version of the desert and Las Vegas, and then neon rises from the desert. Then, eventually, it becomes like a futuristic, hyper-version of Vegas, like a mega Vegas. At the same time, the characters are associated with every era of Las Vegas. So you have Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin in the kind of glamour years, and then it becomes more about performers and strippers and dance clubs as you go up.
And there’s also samples from many of Elvis’s characters he played in films, as well as samples from documentaries that we found that we were able to create gifs from. And so that became the population of it. But the architecture of it is really the birth of Las Vegas.
Did you come up with the concept with U2 and Willie?
It was actually in conjunction with Bono, because we were talking about how to express this idea of a myth – you know, like what happens to celebrities. Elvis was the first mega-celebrity, in a way. Bono said, “Oh, this could be about the death of Elvis, the death of Elvis is an interesting theme.” That was a departure point that became very clear, this idea of the parallel of excess and consumerism and the American dream and what’s happened to the American dream being personified by what happened to Elvis Presley. The lyrics in [“Even Better Than the Real Thing”] are exactly about that theme that I was exploring visually. It worked really well thematically, not just visually.
STUFISH ENTERTAINMENT ARCHITECTS
U2 has a rich history of creating forward-thinking, immersive concert experiences. What were they like as collaborative partners?
It was probably the best collaboration I’ve ever had. They really respect you as an artist. They commissioned John Gerrard, Es Devlin and Brian Eno to make pieces [for U2:UV], and these pieces are art pieces. They really wanted something that would stand alone as an art installation. The technical aspects of working with the scale of the screen at Sphere, that was incredibly complicated. The actual creative process, in terms of being able to make an artwork, that was incredibly easy and rewarding, because they were just fantastically supportive and really easy to work with.
How did realizing this piece on Sphere’s screen differ from other installations you’ve done?
I’d worked on large-scale, site-specific installations, as well as museum and gallery shows. But in this case, it was unprecedented. Both the scale and the resolution were so much more than anything I’d [previously worked on] – and I’d already worked on some fairly ambitious projects. This was, by a factor of four, more ambitious in terms of the technology involved.
What did that specifically involve for you?
The collage is a hybrid: It contains elements that are entirely generated by AI and elements that are computer-generated, but using AI pre-visualization. That helped tremendously in terms of the [expedited] schedule and being able to create something very dense and very rich. But [Sphere] also has very good tools to help you pre-visualize it. As you’re making the work, there’s a headset simulator that they have where you can pick any seat you want and you can choose to sit in the front row or halfway up or in the corner, and you can look at your work on the Sphere in this headset. I was able to do this remotely. I only saw it in Sphere about two and a half weeks ago.
STUFISH ENTERTAINMENT ARCHITECTS
What were the biggest challenges?
Just rendering files that are that size and to create the kind of sharpness and resolution necessary [for Sphere’s screen], it’s challenging. But it’s gonna get easier and easier. As the technology gets better and you have more computing power, you’ll be able to generate visuals at that resolution with in an easier way. So I think it’s kind of future-proof in terms of being able to create visuals; right now, it’s early days. We’re kind of inventing the technology as we go.
Tell me more about how you used AI to create “King Size.”
I was working on another project, for a show that’s coming up next year, using AI, and I was very happy to be familiar with it [when I started working on “King Size”]. I was able to speed up the process, because over the course of making so many of these [visual collages] over the years, I have a huge library of film clips. I was able to train an AI software called Stable Diffusion with all these clips. Basically, the library went into AI, and then I was able to call up images very quickly. It became a kind of a collaboration with me and the AI working to find images that would fit the storyline.
We started using a program called DALL-E in its beta phase and generated a lot of prototype visuals of Elvis and different versions of Elvis, these kind of fantastical exaggerations of Elvis using that program. The good thing about AI right now is I couldn’t have made this work without it in time I had – it would have been impossible to attempt to make something at this resolution and with this kind of detail.
How long might it have taken without AI assistance?It would have taken at least a year. “Heaven’s Gate” took eight months, and the resolution was 8K; this one is 16K, and it has probably four times the number of samples as “Heaven’s Gate.” With every increase in resolution for what I’m doing […] you have to create a canvas that has much more information in it. The rendering at that resolution becomes very time consuming. I was working with a really great post-production company called The Mill in Paris and we were able to output the files fairly quickly.
Courtesy Marco Brambilla Studio, 2023.
How might artists utilize Sphere’s canvas going forward?
They have a sound system that can localize sound very precisely. The screens are so sharp that you’re not aware of pixels, you’re not aware of any kind of resolution, it just looks like a window into another world. It removes the concept of being somewhere. You’re transported somewhere else. There’s so many things you can do with it, because the technology that’s in that building, that’s permanent technology, allows you to experiment with all sorts of interaction between the performance and the screens themselves.
09/30/2023
Billboard was in the orb for the very first night, and we’ve rounded up the best moments from the concert (and venue) debut.
09/30/2023
As Sphere, the innovative new Las Vegas venue, opens its doors to the public with the debut of U2‘s 25-date residency on Friday (Sept. 29) and the premiere of the Darren Aronofsky film Postcard From Earth on Oct. 6, it’s doing so with an array of cutting-edge technology — much of which hadn’t been developed when the project broke ground in 2018.
“A lot of this stuff didn’t exist — it just didn’t,” says MSG Ventures CEO David Dibble, who oversees Sphere’s technology and content teams. “Necessity is the mother of invention, and by God, we had necessity.”
Plenty of Sphere’s advancements feel unique to the facility itself, including the geometry of its bowl-shaped theater and its 4D multisensory technology, which can generate effects like vibration, wind, scent and temperature fluctuations. But two key components — the venue’s audio and visual capabilities — could soon have a ripple effect across the concert business and broader live entertainment industry.
Sphere audiences will hear audio via Sphere Immersive Sound, a system created in tandem with the Berlin-based audio company Holoplot. “The problem that we tried to tackle from the beginning was not to build another sound system — because the world has enough sound systems,” says Holoplot CEO Roman Sick, who founded the company in 2011 with the goal of creating “a realistic, authentic audio experience that is not mainly determined by the room you’re having that audio experience in.”
Sphere executives discovered Holoplot after the company deployed its 3D Audio-Beamforming technology in Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, Germany’s largest train station, in late 2016, allowing multiple audio messages at the same frequency to be sent simultaneously to different parts of the facility.
Holoplot’s X1 Matrix array.
HOLOPLOT
“If you boil it down, we have two core capabilities,” Sick explains. “The functional level, from our perspective, is you can determine where you want to have sound and where you don’t want to have sound. … And the creative bit is the ability to now move audio objects three-dimensionally across that whole volume [of space in a venue] — from left to right and up and down, but also into the audience back and forth.”
Holoplot dubbed the former aspect 3D Audio-Beamforming technology and the latter one Wave Field Synthesis. With Wave Field Synthesis, Sick explains, Holoplot can make the origins of audio imperceptible to create “a hologram of sound” — an accomplishment he calls “the holy grail of spatial audio.”
To implement these features, Sphere Immersive Sound utilizes advanced hardware and software. Behind Sphere’s 160,000-square-foot LED screen sit hundreds of Holoplot’s X1 Matrix arrays, which combine the functionalities of vertical and horizontal line arrays to allow greater control over the formation and shape of audio waves. Holoplot’s software then utilizes proprietary algorithms and machine learning to synthesize creative input and environmental data, collected by sensors throughout the venue, to further refine the system’s audio output.
Sphere Immersive Sound might sound complicated — and it is — but like many of the venue’s production capabilities, it’s designed to be plug-and-play for visiting artists and their teams.
“You don’t need to be a scientist,” Sick says knowingly. “You just say, ‘Hey, I want sound here and over there, for this configuration.’ And the system says, ‘OK, here it is.’” According to Sick, the system has “a large number of preset formats” — mono, stereo, 5.1, Atmos and so on — for artists to choose from. Once they do, “boom, then it’s the normal workflow,” says Sick, adding that an artist’s audio engineer can even use their normal desk: “From that end, nothing really changes.”
Of course, Sphere’s audio advancements didn’t take place in a vacuum. In implementing Holoplot’s technology, Sick and his team had to consider numerous other stakeholders, chief among them those conceptualizing Sphere’s visual capabilities. “You put something in front of a speaker, it’s going to have an effect — and it’s a negative effect, usually,” says Sick, summarizing the challenge of placing high-end audio equipment behind Sphere’s LED screen. Compared to point source or line array speakers, Holoplot’s matrix array had an advantage — it diffuses energy over a larger surface area, reducing the energy passing through an obstruction, in this case Sphere’s LED screen, at any given point. But Sick’s team still had to find “the best compromise between acoustic transparency and meeting the visual requirements.”
Big Sky, the camera developed by Sphere Studios.
Sphere Entertainment
“It’s such a unique and groundbreaking technology that, maybe for the first time ever in the audio-visual world, the images, as incredible as they are, are almost subordinate to the audio experience,” says Andrew Shulkind, senior vp of capture and innovation at Sphere Studios, the Burbank-based entity Sphere launched to develop technology and content tailored specifically for the venue.
That’s saying something: Shulkind became involved with Sphere several years ago to help it create visual content — like Aronofsky’s Postcard For Earth — suited to its massive, high-resolution screen. Initially, Shulkind and his colleagues shot tests using camera arrays, a common but cumbersome filmmaking technique that stitches together video captured from multiple cameras to generate a more detailed product.
“It became pretty obvious quickly that we really need a single-camera solution, for a variety of reasons, for weight and for mobility and ergonomics, and to be able to take all the difficulty of maneuvering something heavy out of the way,” says Shulkind, who enlisted a colleague, Deanan DaSilva, to help create a new camera fit for Sphere.
The resulting device, Big Sky, pushes the boundaries of modern filmmaking technology with a sensor 40 times the resolution of a 4K camera, lenses with high sharpness thresholds and even new data storage solutions to manage the large volume of information it produces. “This was something that [camera makers] weren’t expecting to do for another 10 years,” DaSilva says. “We had to figure out how to move that timeline up.”
Like Sick, ultimately Shulkind and DaSilva had to ensure that their advanced technology was accessible to the outside creators that Sphere wants to court. “We work with external creatives, they come in, they describe what they want to do, they have their support team and then we fill out the capture side,” Shulkind says. “We take the complications of any of these technologies out of the mix, and it becomes about, you know, what story are you trying to tell?”
Filmed by Aronofsky on every continent in conjunction with Sphere Studios, Postcard From Earth, Shulkind explains, was “really designed to take people to another place that they may not have been, or places that they may not have seen in that way before. Darren has been able to marshal all of the different aspects of the venue in service of that goal.”
Shulkind acknowledges Sphere Studios’ myriad technical accomplishments but has a broader view of their implications that transcends the wider implementation of any one of its technologies. For him, Sphere’s format could finally allow filmmakers to “break the rectangle,” or go beyond the rectangular framing of visual storytelling that emerged from rectangular film strips.
“Now that we have all the technology of the minute, whether it’s data storage, whether it’s the fidelity that we’re able to achieve with this high resolution, whether it’s the ability of creating glass that is able to be as sharp as it is, all the different aspects come together to create this greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts [product], radically rethinking how stories are told and how we experience content,” he says. “You’re looking at all these little composite technologies and all the growing currents of where technology has gone over the last 10 years. How do you apply that all for some creative purpose? I think that’s the real experiential success story.”
And that story isn’t over yet. While Sphere’s teams worked diligently to design and implement new technologies for the venue’s opening, Sick, DaSilva, and Shulkin all note that they’ll continue to iterate and improve their tools going forward.
As creatives “start to really discover how to tell stories in the venue … that’ll very clearly drive the technology evolution,” DaSilva says. “We’ve got a to-do list of all the things to try that we’ve not even scratched the surface on.”
“We constantly keep updating our technology,” Sick adds. “There’s new features that we will deploy over time, even after the venue has opened, that will give new capabilities to Sphere.”
It seems likely that at least some of these technologies will eventually move beyond the walls of Sphere’s Las Vegas facility to other venues — but what shape that proliferation will take remains unclear. After all, the Sphere team has already filed more than 60 patents. “One of the reasons we’ve been so aggressive on our patents is imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” Dibble says. “But we’d just as soon not be imitated, because we own it.”