News of April 16, 2012
How the Tupac Projection Was Made and What It Cost
Four months of work, not a true hologram: How AV Concepts and Digital Domain brought the Tupac projection to the Coachella stage for Dr. Dre in 2012.
The day after Coachella, the creators explained how the projection was brought to the stage. Nick Smith, president of AV Concepts-the company that projected and staged the image-told MTV News that the idea came from Dr. Dre.
Not Archival Footage, but Four Months of Animation
The figure itself was created by the effects studio Digital Domain. Its chief creative officer, Ed Ulbrich, emphasized to the Wall Street Journal that it was neither archival material nor found footage, but an animation. Dre had approached the studio about a year earlier, and work took roughly four months.
The costs remained undisclosed. A comparable effect, according to Smith, costs between $100,000 and $400,000, praising the process as “affordable.”
Not a Hologram, but Pepper’s Ghost
Billboard and Rolling Stone clarified that it was not a true hologram. The technique used a 19th-century illusion (“Pepper’s Ghost”): a digital image was projected onto a reflective surface on the stage floor and reflected from there onto a transparent foil. The term “hologram” stuck anyway.