The Tupac projection, nicely rendered by Digital Domain, which won an Oscar for its special effects in the film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, brings what has become a longstanding trend of resurrection to the live stage. On television, we’ve had Paula Abdul dancing with the late Gene Kelly and Groucho Marx (while Cary Grant looked on) in a 2007 Coke ad; Natalie Cole paired with her deceased father Nat King Cole on the “Unforgettable” music video, and Hank Williams. Jr. did the same with Hank Sr. for “Tear In My Beer” way back in 1989. We’ve brought the dead back for duets on records as well, not least notably Tupac’s equally inert colleague Notorious B.I.G., who was summoned up for an appearance on Duets: The Final Chapter.
Going Mobile
We’ve been down this road before, but we’ve never really taken it on the road before, at least at this level. The potential is for this to become more ubiquitous, not least in part thanks to the fact that the technology involved isn’t really all that daunting. In fact, ‘Pac’s reappearance wasn’t a proper hologram, as many if not most media outlets reported, but rather a digital updating of a theatrical trick that dates back to the 19th century called “Pepper’s Ghost,” which Victorian audiences were thrilling to for performances of Charles Dickens plays — while Dickens was still alive. The technique continues in use today where you can see it in action at the Mystery Lodge exhibit at Knott’s Berry Farm and other amusement parks and museums. The technology is far less an issue then is the IP involving Tupac and all the other ghosts of live shows past. In fact, the longer one of the dearly departed has lived among us in recent years, the more filmed and videoed content they likely have left behind, some of it in glorious 720p or better.
As the handful of companies specializing in the exploitation (in the clinical sense of that word) of the image and likeness of deceased celebrities have shown, there’s gold in them thar cemetery hills. Necro-agencies like Authentic Brands regularly license the images of celebs like Marilyn Monroe, Bob Marley and Elvis Presley for film and television appearances, be they via still and video pictorials, impersonations or other media. Dead stars and their associated business generated $2.25 billion in revenue in the U.S. in 2009, according to The Licensing Letter, which tracks such deals. Putting them on a stage “live” is neither a technical challenge nor a huge leap in contract law.
New Routines
The real challenges lie in what to do with the dead once we have them up there. Tupac’s audio was fabricated to some extent. His salutation of “What the f**k is up, Coachella!” is in contrast to the fact that he died in 1996 and the first Coachella festival didn’t take place until 1999. He was good, but he wasn’t that good. Obviously, keeping dead celebrities relevant is going to be a big part of making this projection niche work. Audio of said celebrities is generally available in proportion to the amount of moving footage there is, so manipulating it as digital files isn’t a major challenge, including using syllables from other words to cobble together new key words. (Like, I guess, “Coachella.”) But the big questions will revolve around what the owners of the departed’s intellectual property will allow their client to say and do. Some of that can be interpolated from what they’ve done in the past; Gene Kelly would never pass up the chance to dance with a pretty girl, nor would Groucho, as long as he could make a joke out it, and Tupac did say “f**k” a lot. But in fact, much of what dead performers can do will perhaps be circumscribed less by what they had already done than what they will be allowed to do going forward that will maintain and enhance the value of their image and likeness. Not every “client” of this type of projection is going to have the artistic authority that Dre and Snoop brought to the Coachella event.
But even significant limits on what such avatars can do on stage works to the end of fostering a business here. In an era of chronically-short attention spans, novelty wears off quickly, and the relative simplicity of the projection technology itself could make this an overused gag fast. But the limitations imposed by rights-holders, combined with the somewhat more complex aspects of the post-production processing necessary to get the image to make all the right moves and say all the right things at the right moments, counterbalance what could otherwise quickly devolve into a stage version of a dismal mash-up between Photoshop and GarageBand.
Digital Magic
In the not-too-distant future, technologies such as voice modeling will allow anyone’s voice to be made to say anything (and Auto-Tune will assure that they say it on pitch), and analogous video morphing software will let moving images of those no longer with us to move in ways even they could not have imagined. In a live music industry that continues to rely so heavily on classic rock artists to move tickets, Tupac’s proof-of-concept appearance at Coachella suggests that some of the future’s biggest stars may not need dressing rooms at all. In lieu of flowers, please send Flash drives.
