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So it turns out that Kim Kardashian whisking her friends and family off to a private island in the middle of a pandemic was only the second craziest thing about her 40th birthday celebration. On Thursday, Kardashian revealed what her husband, Kanye West, got her the birthday gift at the top of every woman’s wish list: her very own hologram. And not just any hologram: It was a so-called holographic resurrection of her late father, Robert Kardashian, who died in 2003. Kaleida, a “multimedia hologram company,” published a page to its website taking credit for the creation (Kardashian and West have not yet confirmed the hologram’s origins). Reached by Slate, Kaleida director and producer Daniel Reynolds declined to discuss any specifics of the Kardashian hologram, but agreed to speak about the company and its technology more generally. How exactly do you order a hologram of a late relative? Sadly, our conversation, which has been condensed and edited, took place hologramlessly on the plain old telephone.
© Provided by SlateFor my birthday, Kanye got me the most thoughtful gift of a lifetime. A special surprise from heaven. A hologram of my dad. ✨🤍 It is so lifelike! We watched it over and over, filled with emotion. pic.twitter.com/jD6pHo17KC
— Kim Kardashian West (@KimKardashian) October 29, 2020I can’t even describe what this meant to me and my sisters, my brother, my mom and closest friends to experience together. Thank you so much Kanye for this memory that will last a lifetime ✨ Here’s a more close up view to see the incredible detail. pic.twitter.com/XpxmuHRNok
— Kim Kardashian West (@KimKardashian) October 29, 2020Heather Schwedel: How did you get into the hologram biz?
Daniel Reynolds: We as a company started six years ago to produce a fully holographic show that we toured around Europe. After producing that show, we started getting a lot of commercial inquiries, and we’ve kind of grown from there. The first few years we were really just investing in the technology, R&D–ing, you know, seeing what’s possible, experimenting. Over the last two-and-a-half years, things have really started to take off. A lot more people are interested in holographic technology and its uses. We’ve done quite a few quite famous people. Now, especially in COVID times, we’re getting different sorts of inquiries, holograms as a communication tool primarily, and then obviously projects like the Robert Kardashian hologram. Prior to COVID, we were starting to do a lot more large-scale event holograms, not just for in-person experiences, also for live-streaming for TV broadcasts, for press campaigns and the like.
Have you done a lot of these holograms where you bring someone’s loved one back to life?
We’ve only done these in the last year and a half, and we’ve done five. It’s not necessarily always a loved one, but it is a re-creation of somebody who’s no longer with us.
What do you mean?
We did a hologram of a political leader delivering a very famous speech. I can’t really give that name. That was actually the current prime minister’s father, but it was done for a country. And so a loved one, but not as intimate as one as the one we’ve just done. It can be a musical performer that someone wants resurrected, which, depending on rights, would be private or for public consumption.
How much does something like this cost?
The technology is becoming more accessible, so you can do this on a small scale for tens of thousands, but if you want to do it properly, you’re looking at hundreds of thousands.
Can you tell me how the process works?
The strange thing is it’s not necessarily high-tech. The crucial elements are your traditional sort of filming and performance development. So it is a combination of visual effects, machine learning algorithms, but also physical choreography, and a bit of sound synthesis. But the key element to the production is really the performance. It’s very much a human element, delivering a physical performance rather than just relying on VFX.
The way we approach a project like this is first casting the right person, so that person has to have physical similarity to the person you’re resurrecting. The next part is obviously understanding that person, their behaviors, their tics, their movements, how they express themselves, and kind of learning that so you can deliver that performance when we’re filming.
Is it similar to hiring a stunt double?
I wouldn’t describe it as a body double. I mean, technically, that’s what it is, but you’re hiring someone to deliver a performance. You can have the best hologram in the world, but if that performance is not right, it’s just going to fall flat. I mean, obviously it depends on the context as well. If it’s a holographic resurrection of someone’s loved one, then you really have to get the performance right. The physicality is super important.
How is filming a hologram different than shooting a movie or TV show?
Filming a hologram requires a very specific lighting setup to create dimensionality. It uses the same tools as a normal film shoot. It’s just that the arrangement is very, very specific. So you need to have a very, very good [director of photography]. As holograms become more accessible, you’ll see a lot of different holograms online. A lot of them are very low-quality. They look very flat. The reason they look flat is they haven’t got a very good DP.
What comes after filming?
Once we capture the footage, that’s when the VFX artist gets to work. You have the machine learning algorithm, which is learning—the person you are resurrecting as a hologram, it needs to learn how they express themselves, how they speak, their facial movements. There are different programs out there. People call it different things online. Deepfake becomes the kind of catch-all term, but really what the algorithm is doing is trying to match as many facial similarities between the subject and between the person you’re creating as a hologram. It’s studying all of those similarities.
The quality that you get is dependent on the quality of data that is available: videos, images, et cetera. The better data you have, the better end result you have. So that can oftentimes present something of a challenge. If there just isn’t good high-quality video assets, or there isn’t good vocal recordings, you’re going to run into problems, but that’s really kind of the easy part. The next part is in traditional VFX skills. Let’s say the footage you’re using was filmed in the 1980s, very different look, different kind of feel to that. You can’t just replicate that and present it as a human being in front of you, because you’ve got all that grain, the noise, the distortions, the colors, they’re all different because of the nature of the cameras at the time.
So that’s where having a very, very good compositor comes in, turning that algorithm-generated face into the person you want it to be. That’s bringing up the hairline, making sure the color tone is right, that it matches with the other parts of the hands and neck. It’s quite a lot of work to get something that looks realistic.
Does it work about the same with re-creating a voice?
For voice, the AI will work very similarly. Again, it’s really dependent on amount of data and quality of data. What it’s going to generate is going to be a very flat, sort of unemotional version of that person’s voice. The sound engineer will be playing around with that, distorting it and creating the range that you need. It’s pretty labor-intensive.
What else do you need to do to display the hologram?
The next element is the staging side. Now you have your content—how are you going to create that hologram in a location? There’s a lot of traditional staging elements to the showmanship. So when you enter the room where the hologram is being played, you need to have the right lighting setup, you need to create a sense of expectation, and you need to present the hologram in the right way. In this project, we used a technology called Holonet, which is a holographic gauze. It used to be that a lot of holograms were made on Pepper’s Ghost, the projection onto a 45-degree reflective surface. That is quite time-consuming to set up. It’s very inflexible in terms of where and how it works. You have to be viewing straight on; if you move too far to the left or too far to the right, the image will disappear. Whereas with Holonet, it’s very transportable, portable, it’s very bright, and it gives you a wide range in terms of viewing capability.
Is this how all the hologram companies do it?
The technology we’re now using I don’t think has been used in this context by anyone else. There are other ways that people create holograms of deceased people that might be using a lookalike, or it might be, using VFX tools and creating a 3-D model like the Tupac hologram. Or it might be that you will VFX the subject’s face onto the body of an actor. Each has their own problems in delivering that lifelike form. Using machine learning algorithms is relatively new. It does deliver a much more realistic hologram.
The words or message that a hologram delivers—would they typically be coming from the person who’s paying for the hologram … i.e. did Kanye write what this hologram said?
Could be or could not be, it depends. As a creative house, we might be tasked with creating the text. Each project is different.
You mentioning performers and rights earlier made me wonder, if I came to you and asked you to do something like re-create a dead musician’s performance for my private use, would you be allowed to do that?
Probably not. No.
So you have an ethics policy or certain things you wouldn’t do?
We do. It’s not written down; we don’t have a constitution. Whether it’s a question of who we work for, whether that’s governments, countries, etcetera, also companies, if the key people in the company are not comfortable with something, for whatever reason, we might say no. I’m aware of these discussions that are in the public domain about holographic resurrections. There are obviously people with strong feelings. It’s a legit conversation, but as a company, we’re kind of in a lucky position where we can act with a conscience and decline work if we want.
What sorts of occasions have other holograms you’ve done been for?
Anniversaries, dates of historical importance, or just because they could, no real date in mind. You have people who’ve been looking at this for years and years, maybe they’ve seen different holograms and thought, “Is the technology where I want it to be?” What they’ve been asking for hasn’t been possible previously. Before the techniques we’re using today, it just wasn’t going to produce a high-quality result and therefore, there was no point to do it.
One trend that we see at the moment is a lot of actors and musicians wanting themselves documented as holograms before they actually die. By documenting themselves before they’re deceased, they’ll have high-quality hologram data available should they need to use it in the future. We’ve been working on this one big project in the Middle East where this is the goal. When you’re bringing back deceased pop stars, you often face the same challenges, like what data do we have available, how well known were they, do the public have a very clear memory of what they looked like? You have stars from before we had HD cameras where you can’t really bring them back. That’s bad, because there is demand for that.
At the end of the Kardashian hologram, there was sort of a dissolve into glitter. Do all your holograms end that way?
It depends how you want to present the hologram. It’s not just at the end; you might want to do it at the beginning, like have the person beamed in. The question is who is the audience, and what are their expectations, and what are you really trying to present? You have hologram shows where people are buying live tickets to a performance and they’re going there because they want to feel that that person was really alive and was really there. That has to be complete fidelity. You’re not really producing a hologram; you’re trying to produce a live performance, enabling the audience to pretend that it’s real, even though they know it’s not. The moment that you start dissolving or flickering is the moment that you’re saying this is not really real.
In different contexts, you can present a hologram and you can present it in a very stylized way, kind of like the Princess Leia way. You kind of say to your audience, “We know you know this isn’t real; we’re not trying to pull wool over your eyes.” So it being beamed in, it’s got that glitter, that glitchy aspect to it, you’re bringing people in at the start rather than present something as being real that obviously isn’t.
It’s all about the context. In this instance, it’s a loved one. At the end, you don’t need to do a walk-off. You need to end the content somehow. We’re going to dissolve into stardust, glitter particles, what have you. It just kind of makes sense from an audience perspective.
Expect me, n—a, like you expect Jesus to come back / Expect me … I’m coming.
— Tupac Shakur on the “Outro” of his fourth posthumous album, Better Dayz (2002)
The mood and scene were one and the same out in that empty Southern California field. Dark and ominous. A wind blew furiously as night fell. Time was running out.
With just four days until the start of the 2012 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, there was no room for any more mistakes. Hip-hop impresario Andre “Dr. Dre” Young had a specific vision for his headlining performance with Snoop Dogg.
But the miscues were relentless: unanticipated flashes, rendering errors, plain old glitches, you name it. Nothing seemed to go right during rehearsal as Dr. Dre looked on with Eminem, who was a scheduled special guest for the show. The hood of Marshall Mathers’ jacket draped over his head as he watched in silence.
Oh, my God. We’re going to fail.
That’s what Janelle Croshaw, visual effects supervisor of Academy Award-winning studio Digital Domain, said she thought to herself in the moment. For six weeks, Croshaw, along with fellow supervisor Steve Preeg and their team, had worked tirelessly to make what seemed psychologically, and spiritually, unfathomable: They had to recreate Tupac Amaru Shakur.
And they did. Fifteen years, seven weeks and three days after he was pronounced dead as a result of internal bleeding from five gunshot wounds he sustained in a Las Vegas drive-by, Tupac performed again. It was April 15, 2012. During Dr. Dre and Snoop’s set, a shirtless figure emerged, with a “THUG LIFE” tattoo on his stomach, pinky rings on his hands, pants sagging and Timberlands on his feet. It was the perfect surprise for the final act of the night on the main stage — Dr. Dre and Snoop having already floated through nearly 20 tracks, though no moment would compare to what came next.
“What the f— is up, Coachellaaaaa!”
A computer-generated Tupac made this proclamation to the crowd of 80,000. It raised his arms to roars before he began to perform his posthumous 1998 single “Hail Mary” and 1996 hit collaboration with Snoop, “2 Of Amerikaz Most Wanted.” On this night, the “Tupac Hologram,” what many still call the virtual being, was born.
Technically? It wasn’t a hologram — which is defined as a light-beam-produced, three-dimensional image visible to the naked eye — but rather a two-dimensional projection that employed a theatrical technique first outlined more than 430 years ago.
“It really looked 3-D,” said Nick Smith, president of AV Concepts, the San Diego-based company that projected what he refers to as a “holographic effect.”
“It looked like there was really somebody onstage.”
There was something authentic and visceral about the projection of Tupac that Coachella attendees experienced. The Hall of Fame musical artist died at the age of 25, three years before Coachella debuted in 1999. But Tupac made it to that stage, because Dr. Dre made sure of it.
The technique is called “Pepper’s Ghost,” named after 19th-century British scientist John Henry Pepper, who adapted the method in 1862. The theater trick involves the projection of an image onto an angled piece of glass, which is reflected back onto the stage, providing the audience with the illusion of a ghostly presence.
Three hundred years before Pepper, 16th-century Italian scientist Giambattista della Porta was the first to conceptualize the illusion. In his 1558 Magia Naturalis (Natural Magic), Porta described what would ultimately take the form of the Pepper’s Ghost technique in a chapter he titled “How we may see in a Chamber things that are not.”
Tupac would have appreciated Porta’s work, given his affinity for Italian Renaissance literature during his nine-month prison sentence on sexual assault charges in 1995 (he denied the charges ever after). Most notably, he took a deep dive into Niccolo Machiavelli’s 1532 political treatise The Prince, finding solace in the words of the 16th-century Italian philosopher and political theorist, who in his work presented the idea of feigning death to exploit one’s enemies.
After his release from prison, ’Pac changed his stage name to “Makaveli,” and the final studio album he recorded before he was killed, The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory, was inspired by the legend that Machiavelli faked his death before reappearing seven days later to seek revenge upon his enemies. Tupac’s fascination, or borderline obsession, with Machiavelli in the final few years of his life remains at the heart of the rabbit-hole conspiracy theories surrounding what many still believe to be true: Tupac Shakur faked his death and is still alive.
And so in 2012, when Coachella had two of Tupac’s former Death Row Records labelmates in mind for the festival’s lineup, Dr. Dre toyed with this concept of ’Pac’s legend.
“It was Dre’s idea to bring Tupac back,” said Smith, whose company had been in previous talks with Dr. Dre about the possibility of the late artist performing again digitally. “He and his team had already seen the technology several times and were thinking about how to utilize it. So when Coachella asked them to perform there, that’s the idea he came up with.”
Dr. Dre and his production team were responsible for working with Tupac’s estate and handling the legal ramifications of using his likeness, which required the approval and blessing of his mother, Afeni Shakur (who died in 2016, four years after the Coachella performance). Smith and AV Concepts were responsible for bringing the projection technology to the United States. In place of the technique’s traditional use of glass, AV Concepts would use Mylar foil. And instead of a straightforward projected image, a bespoke computer-generated Tupac was envisioned for the performance.
That’s where Digital Domain came in. The studio’s work on films such as X-Men: Days of Future Past,TRON: Legacy and 2008’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which won an Academy Award for best visual effects, all caught Dr. Dre’s attention. While working on a project in New York, Croshaw received a call regarding the assignment and rushed back to Los Angeles to start working. It was mid-February, and Digital Domain had to have virtual Tupac ready for an April 15 curtain call.
“It was a lot of pressure — more than any project I’ve ever done,” said Croshaw. “Some of the other team members didn’t quite understand. It was like, ‘Who’s Tu-PACK?’ There were people who weren’t quite familiar with him, but those of us who were, the pressure to not fail was probably the biggest motivation to get as far as we did in six weeks. We just couldn’t fail.”
Croshaw and Preeg established a team of 20 — small for a project like this, she said. Their skills spanned every digital effects department imaginable. There were rotoscoping and paint teams to warp and pull the design to make it look like Tupac’s body. There was someone in charge of lighting. There was a technician who figured out ways to automate certain tasks in composite work, which Croshaw headed.
Preeg served as an animation director, heavily involved in the rigging of Tupac’s skeleton. Under him were two animators: one handling the animation for “Hail Mary” and the other for “2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted.” And, last but certainly not least, there was a sculptor who worked down to the 11th hour to make sure Tupac’s face and mouth shapes illustrated his likenesses to a T.
They all packed in one room, where every single inch of the wall was covered with pictures of ’Pac for inspiration and reference. They blasted his records so much that Croshaw’s mother pointed out how much more her daughter had begun cursing. “When you’re making any character in digital effects, you really have to become that character,” Croshaw said, “and never in my life have I transformed into a character more than Tupac.”
They had to make their version of Tupac essentially from scratch. “Because he passed away in the late ’90s, it’s not like these days where a lot of actors have scans done of them. … With Tupac, we didn’t have anything.” They ended up using footage of Tupac’s final live performance from July 4, 1996, at the House of Blues in Los Angeles, which was released on DVD in 2005. The last song ’Pac performs on the tape is “2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted.” So for one of the songs on virtual Tupac’s Coachella set list, there was a point of reference. For the other? Tupac never performed “Hail Mary,” which was released on The 7 Day Theory nearly two months after his death. Digital Domain possessed no footage to match to but had leeway in crafting his movements.
“What makes him, him? What makes him have that spark? We found that he has that smile, you know, that just lights up a room. That was something that we really wanted to embrace, so we spent a lot of time on the smile shape,” Croshaw said. “Another one he has is this, like, kind of crooked sort of eyebrow raise, where one of his eyebrows goes up. These are two signature Tupac looks we really wanted to nail.”
Ghost Hologram Projector
Croshaw, who recalled the creation of Coachella’s digital Tupac via the phone while on maternity leave, didn’t sugarcoat the process. Creating a virtual human being is scary, she said, especially in the initial stages of the design. There was a moment early on when Dr. Dre got a glimpse of Tupac’s face — outside of old photographs and video clips — for the first time in years.
“They were just like, ‘That’s not Tupac. That’s not even close to Tupac,’ ” Croshaw recalled of the reactions of Dr. Dre and his partners for the performance, director Philip Atwell of Geronimo Productions and Dylan Brown of Yard Entertainment. “So there were a lot of moments when we had to reassure them, ‘It’s going to be fine.’ Even though we’re kind of going like, ‘Oh, s—. Is this going to be fine?”
The week of Coachella 2012, Croshaw began making daily 2 1/2-hour drives from Los Angeles to the festival site at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California. She was hand-delivering hard drives containing 16,000 or so frames that would come together to form the digital being of one of the greatest rappers of all time. Yet the California desert wasn’t quite welcoming the virtual return of Makaveli.
“The effect itself is difficult to do. People think the hologram can just appear in thin air. It’s a very elaborate staging apparatus that has to be built to do this, and it has to be in the right conditions,” Smith said. “One of the challenges of doing this effect out at Coachella was you had everything working against you. You had heat, you had cold, you had rain, you had wind. It had to be dark. You had to control all of the lighting, including the moon, which is difficult to do. It’s a perfect effect for a theater, but it’s not the perfect effect for uncontrolled environments.”
Sunday, the point of no return, finally arrived. At the end of the night, Dr. Dre and Snoop took to the stage. When it was time, AV Concepts crew members had about 90 seconds to calibrate their screen in the wind before all systems were a go.
In a matter of moments, Tupac Shakur rose from the floor of the stage and greeted his Death Row brethren.
“What up, Dre!”
“I’m chillin’! What’s up, Pac!”
“What up, Snoop!”
“What’s up my n—a!”
“What the f— is up, Coachellaaaaa! Throw up a m—-f——’ finger, yeah! Makaveli in this —”
The drop of “Hail Mary” cut him off before the eerily real digital figure bounced and swayed to the beat, dancing his way over to Snoop to perform “2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted” in perfect cadence — like they were at the House of Blues and it was 1996.
The performance, which was livestreamed worldwide on YouTube, ended with the virtual Makaveli returning to center stage, bowing his head and then disappearing in a burst of fragments. Croshaw remembers dead silence from the crowd, before a heartbeat appeared on the LED screens flanking the stage and Eminem came out to the sounds of cheers.
“Relief,” said Croshaw. “That’s what I remember the most. The happiness at the end. Kind of like childbirth, actually … the hardest, most painful thing ever, and then after you have the baby you forget about all the pain.”
If creating a virtual human being is scary, watching one is, as well. Upon seeing the “Tupac Hologram” (which went on to win Digital Domain the prestigious Cannes Lions Titanium Award in June 2012, for the most groundbreaking work in the creative communications field), many people didn’t know what to make of it.
“That Pac Hologram haunted me in my sleep,” musician and author Questlove tweeted. UPROXX Editor-in-Chief Brett Michael Dykes reached out to his friend, who saw the performance live. “I thought I was seeing things. One of my friends who was really high got really upset that 2Pac was dead and why are we doing this. A few were confused and thought he might be alive now. I knew it was a hologram right off the bat but then it looked so real …, ” she responded.
Billboard music editor Jason Lipshutz even penned a column, titled “The Problem with the Tupac Hologram,” that summed up his thoughts in a question he poses at the end of the piece: “Why do we need to watch an imitation of Tupac when we have an incomparable plethora of his own art at our disposal?” And, of course, former Death Row CEO Suge Knight had something to say, citing one fundamental problem with the recreation of Tupac’s being: “At the end of the day, how you gonna take the Death Row chain off Pac?” Tupac’s hologram wore a gold cross chain.
The debut performance sparked rumblings that Dr. Dre would be taking ’Pac on tour with him after the festival. But rumors were quickly squashed by the man himself. “It was strictly for Coachella — get it right,” Dr. Dre said in a video message to fans before taking the stage during the second weekend of the festival.
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On that night, April 22, 2012, Dr. Dre and Snoop shared a stage with their virtual homie one more time. And, per Dr. Dre’s words, don’t expect them to do so again anytime soon. Tupac Shakur is dead. He’s not in Cuba, or working as a cashier at a Cluck-U Chicken on the campus of the University of Maryland. He was killed in 1996, and despite his bold lyrical professions, the closest he ever came to making a return to this earth was five years ago in digital form on the Coachella stage.
And if you’re looking for the hologram, you won’t find it at Digital Domain or AV Concepts. The digital asset that Digital Domain created has been archived. Only Tupac’s estate has access.
“Two weekends, two performances,” Janelle Croshaw says with the finality of accomplishment. “That was it.”