Opinion among the Dio faithful, nonetheless, was divided on the subject of his “Dio Returns” comeback tour, largely because Dio has been dead for almost 10 years. The Marina del Rey office suite was the site of a visual-effects company creating a Dio hologram. The hologram would tour with a living backing group consisting, in large part, of former Dio bandmates.
If you missed the tour, you might want to take a moment here and call up one of the fan-shot videos posted on YouTube — say, “Rainbow in the Dark,” Dio’s 1983 hit, filmed at the Center Stage Theater in Atlanta on June 3, during which the Dio hologram prowls a central portion of the stage, bobbing, weaving, twirling his microphone cord to the monster riffs and occasionally using his free hand to air-conduct his most operatic vocal flourishes. (“His” — would “its” be more apt? Neither word feels quite right.) At one point, the bassist, Bjorn Englen, takes several very deliberate steps to his left, allowing the hologram to dance in front of him and adding to the illusion of a three-dimensional conjuring.The hologram itself has an uneasy pallor, a brighter shade than the humans onstage but at the same time insubstantial, like a ghost struggling to fully materialize. One crucial decision that had faced the animators was choosing the right age for their creation. Dio in his MTV-era prime tempted them, of course, but then wouldn’t it be strange to watch him perform alongside band members who were roughed up by the ensuing years like the rest of us? Then again, Dio’s actual age in 2019, were he alive, would be 77, which is not ideal for a heavy-metal frontman. The creative team ultimately settled on a spry, middle-aged Dio, outfitting him in black leather pants, a studded leather wristband and a bell-sleeved white tunic embossed with a silver cross.
A start-up called Eyellusion produced “Dio Returns.” It’s one of a handful of companies looking to mold and ultimately monetize a new, hybrid category of entertainment — part concert, part technology-driven spectacle — centered, thus far, on the holographic afterlives of deceased musical stars. (...)
According to the trade publication Pollstar, roughly half of the 20 top-grossing North American touring acts of 2019 were led by artists who were at least 60 years old, among them Cher, Kiss, Fleetwood Mac, Paul McCartney, Dead & Company and Billy Joel; the Rolling Stones, Elton John and Bob Seger took the top three slots. Using technology to blur the line between the quick and the dead tends to be a recipe for dystopian science fiction, but in this case, it could also mean a lucrative new income stream for a music industry in flux, at a time when beloved entertainers can no longer count on CD or download revenues to support their loved ones after they’ve died. “If you’re an estate in the age of streaming and algorithms, you’re thinking: Where is our revenue coming from?” Brian Baumley, who handles publicity for Eyellusion, told me. Some of those estates, Baumley bets, will arrive at a reasonable conclusion about the dead artists whose legacies they hope to extend: “We have to put them back on the road.”
Tupac Shakur became one of the earliest test subjects for the new technology 15 years after his murder, when his hologram made a surprise appearance at the 2012 Coachella festival. To actually project a person-size holographic image into three-dimensional space, à la Princess Leia in “Star Wars,” would require powerful, prohibitively expensive lasers that would also burn human flesh. The Tupac hologram was created with a combination of C.G.I., a body double and a 19th-century theatrical trick known as Pepper’s Ghost, some variation of which has been used for almost all the hologram musical performances of recent years.
As the magician and magic historian Jim Steinmeyer recounts in his book “Hiding the Elephant,” John Henry Pepper, the director of the Royal Polytechnic Institution in London, popularized the technology with a dramatization of a scene from the Charles Dickens novella “The Haunted Man” on Christmas Eve 1862. To call up his ghosts, Pepper projected a bright light onto an actor in a hidden, cutout space beneath the stage, something like an orchestra pit, casting a reflection onto an angled pane of glass. The glass stood upright on the stage but remained invisible to the audience. The spectral image appeared slightly behind the glass, “moving in the same space with the actors and the scenery,” Steinmeyer writes. “If all the players were perfectly synchronized, the ghost could interact with the characters onstage, avoiding sword thrusts or walking through walls.” Pepper intended the original display, which took place at the Polytechnic Institution, as a scientific lecture, but the audience’s riotous response persuaded him to go the magician’s route, and soon he began touring the illusion in British and American theaters.
The Tupac hologram performed only two songs, shouting, “What the [expletive] is up, Coachella?” and rapping “2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted” alongside Snoop Dogg. But his digital resurrection worked as a proof of concept. (...)
The more bullish hologram boosters envision all sorts of uses beyond the second coming of music deities major and minor. Finnerty just made a hologram for the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library of the former president. Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India has campaigned holographically, and a circus in Germany uses holographic projections of elephants and horses instead of live animals. Base, meanwhile, has cut a deal with Jack Horner, the paleontologist who served as a scientific adviser for “Jurassic Park,” to create dinosaur holograms that will travel to natural-history museums. Imagine, Becker said, a dialogue between holograms of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. Or a Julia Child hologram teaching a cooking class. Or a Derek Jeter hologram teaching you how to bat.
by Mark Binelli, NY Times | Read more:As the magician and magic historian Jim Steinmeyer recounts in his book “Hiding the Elephant,” John Henry Pepper, the director of the Royal Polytechnic Institution in London, popularized the technology with a dramatization of a scene from the Charles Dickens novella “The Haunted Man” on Christmas Eve 1862. To call up his ghosts, Pepper projected a bright light onto an actor in a hidden, cutout space beneath the stage, something like an orchestra pit, casting a reflection onto an angled pane of glass. The glass stood upright on the stage but remained invisible to the audience. The spectral image appeared slightly behind the glass, “moving in the same space with the actors and the scenery,” Steinmeyer writes. “If all the players were perfectly synchronized, the ghost could interact with the characters onstage, avoiding sword thrusts or walking through walls.” Pepper intended the original display, which took place at the Polytechnic Institution, as a scientific lecture, but the audience’s riotous response persuaded him to go the magician’s route, and soon he began touring the illusion in British and American theaters.
The Tupac hologram performed only two songs, shouting, “What the [expletive] is up, Coachella?” and rapping “2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted” alongside Snoop Dogg. But his digital resurrection worked as a proof of concept. (...)
The more bullish hologram boosters envision all sorts of uses beyond the second coming of music deities major and minor. Finnerty just made a hologram for the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library of the former president. Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India has campaigned holographically, and a circus in Germany uses holographic projections of elephants and horses instead of live animals. Base, meanwhile, has cut a deal with Jack Horner, the paleontologist who served as a scientific adviser for “Jurassic Park,” to create dinosaur holograms that will travel to natural-history museums. Imagine, Becker said, a dialogue between holograms of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. Or a Julia Child hologram teaching a cooking class. Or a Derek Jeter hologram teaching you how to bat.
Image: Base Holograms
