Client: AT&T | Year: 2021 | Agency: Wasserman | Role: Associate Creative Director, Creative Director: Kristen Curtis
Every year, AT&T hosts a concert for fans at the College Football Playoff. Because they couldn’t attend in person this year, we created a virtual concert using the latest and greatest in technology: the xR stage.
The largest of its kind at the time, this xR stage had LED walls and floors, as well as AR extensions that gave it the surreal illusion of movie magic in real time.
Before we knew who our artist was going to be, we had to determine what type of visual identity we were going to use in the show. Here are my four favorites of the 8 we presented.
Constellation of Connection became the show’s thematic. It was an amalgamation of a few of our initial ideas, and we loved how much it allowed us to play with the stage itself and show off the technology.
Our branded show intro and outros were lovingly named Rush. We personified the Playoff Playlist Live! logo with beams of racing light and energy kicking us off on our journey into and out of space.
We built each scene for Jason’s 10 song set frame by frame in first in Photoshop and then worked with xR artists to bring them to life in both Unreal Engine and Notch.
Our partners at Flight School took our initial frames and created the xR scenes to match. Take You Dancing, for instance, had three distinct scenes: day, dusk, and night. Below you can see it on the big screen!
That’s me! I managed the visuals for each song, the transitions between songs, the behind the scenes content and interviews, editing together the pre- and post- shows, creating the social posts, and overseeing the final edit with AT&T branding.
AT&T THANKS members were eligible to participate in the 5G Fan Wall where they each had a virtual meet and green and photo moment with Jason Derulo. The wall functioned in real time with zero lag so the fans could each talk with the artist. They also received an exclusive performance of Savage Love where they were able to dance along with Jason.
It really took a village to get the xR scenes up and running. Here’s a look behind the battle stations of the Swalla alien planet on the left and a shot of Jason blasting through the Whatcha Say Miami streets on the right.
This may have been my favorite moment of the whole show. Initially, the sun here was a barren moon, but I had our xR artist change it last minute to a sun and it positively beamed on stage.
Another truly incredible setting was the Ridin’ Solo storyline of opening on a desert planet, getting abducted, and ending the song out in a mind-bending alien ship. We incorporated the most special effects into this song in post, which in turn made it Jason’s favorite scene. He even posted a cutdown from this song on his Tik Tok!
The wildly popular summer hit, Savage Love, was performed on a rocky planet, lit up by a dancing cube that matched the viral Tik Tok dance.