The Ultimate Stage Show: Justin Bieber's Purpose Tour

Justin Bieber’s Purpose Tour ran for over a year with more than 150 shows in six continents over 18 months. His third world tour for his fourth studio album, the show featured captivating environments and visuals created by Los Angeles-based Possible.

Founded in 2010, Possible is a design and animation house specializing in creating content for world tours, live events, and large-scale installations, including Coachella and the League of Legends World Championship’s opening ceremony.

For Purpose Tour, Possible, led by director Michael Figge, teamed up with creative director Nick DeMoura and show producer Chris Gratton to create looks and cinematics. Using a combination of Maxon Cinema 4D, Adobe After Effects, X-Particles, TurbulenceFD, and Octane, Figge’s team designed, shot, animated, and edited 22 full-song scenics, as well as three intros and interstitials.

Live Design asked Figge, Possible’s co-founder, and producers Roy Chung and Ryan Chung, to talk about Possible’s role in the tour.

Live Design: How did you get to work on this project?

Michael Figge: We were approached by Justin’s team to handle the visual components of the tour. Possible is known for producing high-end stage visuals for the biggest artists and shows around the world.

LD: How did they explain the look and feel they wanted for the stage environment and visuals?

Michael Figge: The show’s creative director, Nick DeMoura, gave us a deck that illustrated the themes and key moments of the show’s arc, and we all worked to key off of the deck, investigating related aesthetics. Working with surfaces on stage differs from traditional broadcast formats—TV, tablets, phones—because the scale of each piece of art needs to have a relationship with the performers. We used Cinema 4D to help sketch out concepts quickly during the design process and provided stage renderings to illustrate how certain moments could play on stage.

LD: What did you look to for inspiration when designing the show?

Roy Chung: When we begin researching design looks, we start with the artist’s existing aesthetic and feel out how much or little we need to adhere to. We always want the show to feel cohesive with the artist’s brand, but if they’re willing to take risks, it can lead to some really fulfilling creative departures. For this show, we drew inspiration from Justin’s album art, music videos, and a robust exchange of design references between Nick, our team, and all the major stakeholders.

LD: At one point, Bieber sings “Mark My Words” while hanging over the stage in a glass box. Talk about how you created that unique environment.

Michael Figge: With all of the cutting-edge technology we had on stage, we thought it would be an interesting point of entry for us to start with symbols that have endured the test of time, like classic sculpture and hieroglyphics. We modeled, textured, and lit the environments with C4D and Octane Render.

LD: Many of the stage environments include dancers. Could you talk about ways you created content that interacted with dancers?

Ryan Chung: Once we had references for certain segments of choreography, we built environments for those movements. For example, when dancers floated at various elevations in front of the upstage video wall, we wanted them to have an ethereal quality that was enhanced by combining their motion with high-density X-Particle emissions distorted by TurbulenceFD plumes. That gave the particles a movement that dynamically interacted with the edges of the LED wall.

LD: How did you get the many things happening on stage to come together so seamlessly?

Michael Figge: We worked closely with the choreography and lighting teams to coordinate moments. With an LED wall that size, it’s easy to drown out other things that are happening on stage. Talking about when and where we needed negative space helped us make sure we were working in concert with everything else that was happening.

LD: Explain a bit about how you used scale and forced perspective to make the stage appear much larger than it was.

Roy Chung: Scale is always important to us. If you get it wrong, the content would wind up having a Spinal Tap effect [where miscalculations mean the band in the mockumentary winds up with a miniature Stonehenge]. We always take care to make sure that scenic content is built to scale.

LD: Dancers sometimes used set pieces, like a half-pipe for skateboarders, during “What Do You Mean?” Tell us about how you extended those into the screen content.

Ryan Chung: Seamlessly merging scenic with LED content is a tool we’ve employed before on some of the award shows we’ve worked on. With limited budgets and timelines, scenic pieces sometimes need to be supported by content in order to feel truly transportive. In this particular case, having a half-pipe on stage was just such a cool and fun idea, and we knew we wanted to create an environment that made sense while also helping the half-pipe feel more dimensional by giving it a context. To make sure the scale was correct, we first brought in the fabricator’s model of the half-pipe into Cinema 4D.

LD: What are you working on now?

Michael Figge: We’ve got about a half dozen shows launching in the next month, so stay tuned.        

Meleah Maynard is a writer and editor in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

 

Credits

Director: Michael Figge

Producers: Roy Chung, Ryan Chung, Kerry Brown, Katie Plummer 

Associate Producer: Alexandra Dolce

Art Director: Ronald Monahan 

Senior Artist: Chris Anderson

Artist/Editor: Ismael Zendejas

Design & Animation: Mike Winkelmann, Trevor Kerr, Scott Peters

Editor: Ryan Costa

Composer: Danny Choi

Sound Design: Robert Brinkerhoff

Purpose Tour Creative Team

Creative Director/Choreographer: Nick DeMoura

Tour Director/Production Manager: Chris Gratton

Production Designers: Nick Demoura and Chris Gratton

Purpose Tour Cinematics Team

Directors: Michael Figge, Scott Peters

FIRST AD: Li Lu

Producers: Kerry Brown, Roy Chung, Ryan Chung, Katie Plummer

Dancers: Aubree Storm, Jonathan Erasme, Jonathan Rabon, Yusuke Nakai, Jordan Ward, Mykell Wilson, Carlos Salvador, Elysandra Quinones, Mona Berntsen, Devan Smith, Jasmine Perri, Christina Chandler, David Shreibman, Luis Rosado, Kyle Cordova, Rudy Reynon, Jacob Landgrebe, Delaney Glazer

On-Site VFX: Chris Anderson, Ronald Monahan, Ismael Zendejas

Cinematographer: Andrew Mueller

FIRST AC: Ezra Riley

Gaffer: Travis Stewart

Best Boy Electric: Carlos Apodaca

Key Grip: David Newbert

Best Boy Grip: Ron Tondreau

Head of Wardrobe: Kiyomi Hara

Wardrobe Assistant: Jennifer Jones

Stunt Coordinator: Nick Brett

Stunt Riggers: Rico Burgos, Craig Jensen

LED Wall Tech: Steve Otten

Studio PA: Alexandra Dolce

Key Set PA: Sean O’Connor

Set PAs: Cory K Riley, Saw-Ann Bryan, Cori Elwood, Shawn Murphy, Andre Andrews

Groomer: Florido Basallo

Purpose Tour Touring Team

Lighting Designer: Cory Fitzgerald, Nick Van Nostrand

Lighting Programmer: Davey Martinez

Stage Manager: Timmy Doyle

Production Coordinator: Jessica Sheehan, Eric Johnson

Pro-Tools: Dylan Ely

Video Crew Chief: Sean “Sharky” Harper

Video LED/Operators: Christopher Campbell, Austin Wavra, Colton Carroll, Kyle Brinkman, Gerald Rodgers, Dylan Taylor

Road Manager: Scott Lawson

Tour Manager: David Klein

Live Video Director: Mike Drew

Video Engineer: David Vega

Video Programmer: Drew Atienza, Sean “Sharky” Harper

Pyro Crew Chief: Ron Bleggi

Musical Director: Bernard Harvey