Screens producer Drew Findley of DF Productions made his second NFL appearance this year, creating the content and video systems for the Super Bowl LVI Pepsi Halftime Show, which aired on Sunday, February 13, 2022 on NBC from SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles. "This was my second Super Bowl Halftime Show as the screens producer," confirms Findley, "but my first with the whole show out on the field. Last year with The Weeknd was a great show but a different experience. Last year we had our set in the seats that we could access most of the day. This year was more what I guess you might call a traditional setup where the scenery all has to load onto the field in eight minutes."
The design brief from designer Es Devlin and Dr. Dre, the rap star who took the creative lead for the show, was all about highlighting Dre's hometown of Compton, CA. "It would be the center point and the impetus for all the design decisions to be made in the process. All of the scenic rooms like Dre’s Studio, Tam’s Burger, the Barber Shop, Snoop’s House, the Courthouse, and the MLK Memorial laid out on a glowing map of Compton were designed to celebrate the city, its people and culture. Our goals with content were to support this celebration by helping to bring what we see outside the windows of the rooms to life and create musical dynamics with the LED ribbons in the stadium," explains Findley.
"After Es and her team had finalized which buildings would be used in the neighborhood, Dan Efros and I went on a scout of all the locations. We walked around, took photos and videos of the architectural styles and tried to just get an overall feel for what elements would be successful in identifying and celebrating Compton," Findley notes. "All of the establishments used in our scenes were created with inspiration from multiple actual locations with the exception of Dale’s Donuts, a Compton landmark. Although we did use creative license to move it to outside our Barbershop."
To create the images, Findley and his team started by modeling all the buildings and streets in either Cinema 4D or Blender. "These assets were then loaded into Substance 3D Painter for texturing and materials. Then they were imported into Unreal Engine for layout, lighting, final texturing, and rendering. After rendering out the scenes we brought them into After Effects where we added all the GIF animations of the Compton life to complete our scenes and do our final grading. These GIF animations of the bouncing cars, horseback riders and bikes all were done in a glitch style to create a patchwork effect to the window scenes. In the interior scene for the Nightclub we also added DMX fixtures in Unreal Engine that were programed over Artnet with an ETC EOS Nomad," says Findley. "To keep it all moving we run a Perforce Version Control server in the office for Unreal Engine so we can have multiple artists all working on layouts in the same project. This enabled our team of Dan Efros, Kevan Loney, Chris Werner, Peter Kelly, and myself to all be working at the same time."
The video content was shown in the scenic rooms' LED windows, the five levels of LED ribbons that wrap around the stadium, and the Oculus screen above the field although that was mainly used for IMAG. "For playback we used two disguise GX2c and four disguise VX4 servers that ran into two Spyder x80s to feed all our scenic rooms and stadium LED," Findley points out. "To integrate with the stadium we had to run all our feeds (and deliver our content) as HDR. We also had two Green Hippo Karst servers that handled all of the pixel mapping for the field drop of Compton. Everything was controlled by 2 GrandMA3 Lites. Our playback system was designed and provided by Mobius Productions with Jason Rudolph at the programming helm and Tim Nauss as engineer." The server system provided by Mobius Productions and LED provided by Fuse.
Findley started working on the show in October 2021: "We started weekly Zoom meetings with the whole team to go through all the aspects of the production and how it was progressing. Our closest collaborators would have to be Es Devlin and her team including Benjamin Lucraft and Gonzalo Padilla. Being the creators of the design concept they worked as our north star and helped guide us through towards the end. But there were so many collaborators on the project. Because the screens were very present in the rooms and the stadium we had to collaborate with almost every department but especially with our lighting designer Al Gurdon on color and levels and our director Hamish Hamilton on perspective of the views outside the room windows. I would be remiss though not to call out the rest of our collaborators like Bruce Rodgers, Fatima Robinson, Adam Blackstone, Alexandre Moors, Dave Free, and Lila Nikole not to mention our producers Jesse Collins, Dionne Harmon, Dave Meyers, Aaron Cooke, and Roc Nation," he notes.
"The most challenging part of the whole process is that you get very little time with the actual scenic and stadium screens to rehearse," Findley admits. "Because the Super Bowl is such a massive event we only got specific times leading up to show day where we could have our set on the field and take control of the screens. The most satisfying part of the process though is seeing everything come together on show day. It takes everybody achieving at a very high level to get all this scenic, lighting and LED rolled onto the field, powered up with signal and captured on camera.
Video gear list:
2 disguise GX2c
4 disguise VX4
2 Green Hippo Karst (pixel mapping field drop)
2 Spyder x80 handling HDR conversion and IMAG mapping for the Oculus
grandMA3 lites for control
ROE CB3 Calibrated for HDR
SX40 Processing with full redundancy – both on the field [Redundant Cabling and back feed] and at the processing rack [Active Backup].
Doubled fiber connections so any single crew member has full control of solo trouble shooting and going to backup while power up on the field.
AJA FIDO’s handled the 3G Feeds including full backups.
Fuse Crew:
Brandon Oosterhoff
Rod Silhanek
John Bowman
Luke Pilato – LED LEAD
Michael Spencer – Fuse Project Manager
Graham Buttrey – Account Manager
Live Design's coverage of this year's Super Bowl LVI Halftime Show is sponsored by All Access.