J.T. Rooney will be a featured speaker at LDI's XR & Virtual Production: Creating Immersive Experiences session on Saturday, December 2 in Las Vegas. Live Design chats with this guru of immersive experiences utilizing modern technology in extended, augmented, and virtual reality.
Live Design: What was your career path to the world of XR and Silent Partners Studio?
J.T. Rooney: Like most people in entertainment, I was in the right place at the right time and had a lot of really kind people who helped get me to the next opportunity. I started my career at the New World Symphony, creating immersive projections for orchestral performances and operas, and it allowed me to hop to Lightborne in Cincinnati, Ohio. Ben Nicholson and others at Lightborne really allowed me some great opportunities with touring visuals for Katy Perry, Billy Joel, Deadmau5, Fleetwood Mac, and others, which quickly got me into the world of entertainment.
After years at Lightborne, I moved to Los Angeles to help open up the office for Silent Partners Studio, who are based in Montreal. Teaming up with Gabriel Coutu-Dumont and the SPS team brought a bunch of new opportunities in the touring space. I got to work with Taylor Swift, P!NK, Harry Styles, Audi, and more; and also was the focus of a major push towards real-time rendering and graphics during shows. We focused on really pushing NotchVFX on shows and helped make it an industry standard. This attention to real-time rendering and camera tracking in AR really helped push a focus towards XR and Mixed Reality solutions.
Silent Partners Studio helped start XR Studios with a few partners, with the goal to fill a gap in the market. We felt there was a missing hole between the pure creative and the pure technical, and it really helped give clients and teams the support they needed to hop into this new technical landscape.
Kylie Minogue - Tension (Official Video)
LD: What are the parameters of your day-to-day workflow?
JTR: Day-to-day at XR Studios is full of education and guiding people into this new space. A lot of our time is spent helping folks understand what is possible so they can leverage the technology to their creative needs. We really try to lay down the parameters for everyone so they can do cool and new things with it. Our new Campus in Hollywood features two different LED volumes, as well as a creative campus that is home to other partners and collaborators such as Solotech’s US Division and Silent Partners Studio, to name a couple. Plus, we have different creative partners joining in soon in some of the available suites in the historic Eastman Kodak building. The space is really exciting and ever-changing. I think it’s interesting to balance development and experimentation alongside productions, and that’s what we do at the Campus!
LD: XR Production - a new production paradigm - what does it entail?
JTR: XR has always been a vague term. It’s intentional that XR Studios is called that, as Extended Reality is something that can cover a lot of different workflows, technologies, and is ever-growing. At the moment, XR in the Live Entertainment space is based off of disguise’s approach, with the term “xR” for really using mixed reality workflows to extend LED content into the virtual world, and using tracked cameras and real-time content generation. In our studio, this either means that productions are using an LED floor in conjunction with an LED wall, or using a more cinematic-based setup that has an LED ceiling in addition to the wall.
For live entertainment and multi-camera broadcasts, XR fortunately became a great solution during the pandemic, but we’ve actually seen it grow into a new avenue for entertainment after the fact. For livestream specials, pre-recorded performances, and for creating content as a whole, it has been extremely helpful and exciting to see what’s possible.
Live Design: Can you talk a little about some recent projects you have worked on - specific challenges and solutions?
JTR: Recently, XR Studios has been fortunate to have some projects, which during the strikes in Hollywood, has been extremely lucky. Our time has been spent more in the short-form market, so we’ve been playing a lot in commercials, music videos, corporate pieces, brands, and television specials.
A recent highlight has been a music video with Kylie Minogue for her new song “Tension.” This piece was so exciting as it was with Sophie Muller, who is a legend in the music video space, plus getting to work with Kylie was fantastic. This video featured AI-generated backgrounds on the XR Studios volume. The team was able to accomplish a lot in a short amount of time and really play with the space and the technology.
Dancing With The Stars is another recent project highlight. XR Studios and Silent Partners Studio were kindly invited to help create the season cold-open, as well as the cold-open for the Disney 100th Anniversary episode for the currently airing season of Dancing With The Stars. We were able to capture both of these spots in a short amount of time, using both LED Studios side-by-side to capture dancers, Disney assets and IP, as well as integrating a car for the Hyundai sponsorship of the piece. It was a great use showing the dream of the facility with a lot of things happening quickly, and using the tech in a more playful manner to explore disco-ball planets and flying through Disney clouds.
Premiere Night Opening Number | Dancing with the Stars
We also shot will.i.am and J Balvin’s F1 “Let’s Go” music video. This one was really special and showcased a really high-quality, cinematic end product using both studios at XR Studios, practical sets, a chrome-covered F1 Car, and lots of different setups. XR Studios’ first location was with will.i.am in his Hollywood studio, so it was great to reconnect with him and his team to show them how far the technology has come in a few short years.
will.i.am, J Balvin - LET'S GO (Official Music Video)
LD: How do you keep pace with new technological advances?
JTR: Something that has always been important for my career has been keeping up with new technologies and it's especially present for content creation and visuals; especially since it's all software based and full of tools. For both Silent Partners and XR Studios, things are evolving weekly with advances in AI, new workflows, faster machines and bigger demands, and new discoveries.
LD: How do you bring your creative vision alive in a high-tech setting?
JTR: Creativity and technology often play really well together in the entertainment world — a new light or product can help spark an idea or a capability for a concert — and it's the same in the world of video technology and Mixed rReality workflows. The most exciting use-cases of XR and the studio, or Augmented Reality for broadcasts or concerts, have been when the technology opens a new window into a world that you couldn’t previously play in. Using the technology to travel somewhere new and exciting is far more exciting to me than re-creating something that you’ve seen before.
LD: What advice do you have for young people entering the market today?
JTR: Learning how to learn new technology is crucial. It doesn’t matter as much about knowing all of the specific buttons and tools; it's much more about having an appreciation for troubleshooting and challenging yourself on how to pick things up quickly. The world is moving too quickly in all disciplines nowadays to focus too much on one specific workflow or set of tools, you need to be ready to grow and accept changes.
LD: What will you be speaking about at LDI?
JTR: I’ll be speaking about how one actually does productions in this technical space, how to work with educating clients and crew alike, and how we merge Mixed Reality into things at XR Studios, as well as how it bleeds into Silent Partners Studios’ work in tours, events, installations, and broadcasts.
Disney100 Night Opening Number | Dancing with the Stars