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Michael Jackson News / Re: billboard awards
« on: May 23, 2014, 09:34:38 AM »The Secret Of Michael Jackson's Illusion
THE GRAND ILLUSION
Audiences at Sunday's Billboard Music Awards ceremony were treated to a performance of Slave to the Rhythm by none other than the late Michael Jackson himself. Though widely mistaken as a hologram, the performance by Michael Jackson was the result of computer-generated images, live performers and a touch of illusion known as Pepper's ghost. Here's how producers mixed fantasy with reality:
SAN RAFAEL, Calif. — Michael Jackson came back to life last Sunday on the Billboard Music Awards telecast. And the team that orchestrated his high-tech resurrection is beaming through their fatigue.
"It scared us to death to create an image that had to look, feel and function for four minutes like an entertainer everyone in the world knows," says Frank Patterson, CEO of digital effects firm Pulse Evolution. "You have to see his eyes and moves and believe it was him."
After a week of social and online media speculation about how the effect was pulled off, Florida-based Pulse exclusively invited USA TODAY to its Bay Area studios, located in the former headquarters of George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic, to explain the details behind Jackson's performance of Slave to the Rhythm, off the late singer's new album, Xscape.
But first, a plea. "It's not a hologram," says Pulse Executive Chairman John Textor, sitting in the room where the Jackson effect was crafted with Patterson and visual effects supervisor Stephen Rosenbaum, who worked on Avatar.
So what is it? "An illusion," Patterson says.
Indeed, Pulse refined a 19th-century magician's technique called Pepper's ghost, which Textor — then leading Oscar-winning graphics company Digital Domain — also employed to summon the ghost of slain rapper Tupac Shakur at the Coachella music festival in 2012. The effect involves projecting an image on glass or plastic at a 45-degree angle, which brings that image into the viewer's field of view.
But the Jackson illusion was infinitely more complex to pull off. "Tupac had no hair, and just stood there, where Michael had to be all over the place," Patterson says.
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