“Multiple millions” went into the production of the minutes-long Michael Jackson hologram show.

Here's  Some more information about the cost and the work that went into creating the digital Michael Jackson image that performed 'Slave To The Rhythm' at the Billboard Music Awards. ~ Qbee


"Digital humans, synthetic humans?

 We're struggling on what to call this."

A synthetic (or digital) Michael Jackson performs at the Billboard Music Awards.

Eyes popped at the staggering $500,000 cost to produce Michael Jackson's nearly 14-minute-long "Thriller" video in 1983. Fast forward to today, and a nearly 4-minute-long hologram performance at the recent Billboard Music Awards by a now-deceased Jackson cost "multiple millions" to make, according to Frank Patterson, the chief executive of Pulse, the company that produced the show. Patterson said in a phone interview that he was still ringing up the cash register and had not yet finalized the tab.


The Jackson estate, he said, had asked Pulse to do the job. Six months later, and after countless hours of coding and "reviewing thousands of videos of Michael's work," the King of Pop was brought back to life.

Simulating Jackson's moon walking was nothing compared to making the hair look right. "Getting the hair to act and look like Michael's hair was a feat," Patterson said. Using custom coding and animation programs like Maya and Nuke, Patterson said that Pulse remade Jackson countless times.

"We had what we thought was perfect motion and animation, but it didn't feel like Michael Jackson," he said. So the company tried "instilling humanity into the visual object," he said. Along the way, "It started giving us chills." Even so, the May 18 show in Las Vegas almost didn't happen because the owners of technology famously employed to digitally produce deceased rapper Tupac Shakur tried to block the resurrection of Jackson.

Days before the Billboard Music Awards, a Las Vegas federal judge put the brakes on an emergency injunction demand from patent holders Hologram USA and Musion Das Hologram. The patent holders claimed that Jackson's 3-D dancing and singing image would infringe two of their patents, one being the "Pepper's Ghost Illusion" that paved the way for Tupac to appear at the Coachella music festival in 2012.

US District Judge Kent Dawson, however, ruled that Hologram USA and Musion could not immediately prove that their technology would be breached when the deceased Jackson belts his posthumously produced new tune "Slave to the Rhythm."

That the show went on brings with it new worries for celebrities. To be sure, where to dine and vacation are among the stars' usual concerns. But Pulse executive chairman John Textor said that the time has come for celebrities to increase the vanity volume to 11 and begin mulling over their "synthetic" or "digital" image, as he described it. "We think living celebrities should be concerned now about controlling their digital likeness," Textor said in a telephone call.

He's not even sure of the words to use to describe a hologram of a human. "Digital humans, synthetic humans?" he said. "We're struggling on what to call this."


Source: David Kravets arstechnica.com