Vax Live: The Concert to Reunite the World
On May 2, 2021 the new SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, CA welcomed an audience in for the USA’s first large-scale music event for a Covid 19-compliant audience. Over 27,000 fully vaccinated frontline healthcare workers and first responders were invited to attend the taping of Global Citizen’s Vax Live: The Concert to Reunite the World. Broadcast on May 8 worldwide to 100 countries and streamed globally on YouTube, the concert was part of Global Citizen’s Recovery Plan for the World campaign. It brought together artists, entertainers, and world leaders to ensure equitable vaccine distribution around the world, tackle Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy, and celebrate a hopeful future. Hosted by Selena Gomez, with a wide range of celebrity guests and featuring performances by Jennifer Lopez, Eddie Vedder, Foo Fighters, J Balvin, and H.E.R., Vax Live raised $302 million in funding along with commitments for over 26 million Covid-19 vaccine doses for the world’s most marginalized communities.
Though it was the first time SoFi Stadium had a large audience in attendance, having opened during the pandemic, it was actually the second time the concert’s production designer Tamlyn Wright has worked in the new venue. Wright, one of the partners and principals of the design firm Silent House had previously been in SoFi for the NFL Honors. “I was lucky enough to be in there earlier this year and I have to say, it really is a gorgeous building,” comments Wright. “And now getting to do this event, the Vax Live concert, was a wonderful experience. To have this amazing group of people there in the audience, and get to be part of thanking those healthcare workers and first responders and part of bringing everyone together, it was a great way to reopen with an audience.”
A Group Hug
Wanting the production design to reinforce the sense of appreciation for the work of the audience members Wright states, “When we approached the design, we literally wanted to give the audience a hug. It was about saying thank you. It was about embracing them as they entered the space of SoFi. We were also able to relate the design back to the architecture of the space, which carries that sense of embracing people as well. There are a lot of curves within SoFi’s design and it has this beautiful circular scoreboard, the Oculus.”
A centerpiece element of the stadium, the Oculus weighs 2.2 million pounds and includes 70,000 square feet of LEDs inside and outside. “It looks as if it is levitating with an inside and outside ring floating up towards the ceiling of stadium. In essence there is this hug gesture to it already,” Wright describes. “Then there are the LED strips—like the LED info tickers that you see at any stadium—but these have such a really beautiful gesture to them because they step down and up at different places in the architecture and give a real sense of movement.”
In terms of stage layout, knowing they would only need to accommodate a third of capacity audience, the decision was made to go wide as explained by Wright. “We took what would normally be a stadium end show and tilted it 90˚ and went wide. It’s something that you would never do for ticket sales, but it was something that gave everyone a better seat in this instance with this audience. We really were able to give everyone on the floor a fantastic space to be in that had a nice radial effect from the center stage.”
For the stage itself, Wright notes that the design team took inspiration from the Global Citizen’s logo. “We took that O and gave ourselves a circle stage in the middle, which for me, pulls it all together; both the emblem and the hug. We then went with a painted light grey surface on the stage that was able to change color to suit the creative of each performance. The Global Citizen O is red, but red wasn’t always appropriate for some of the show’s moments, so it was a nice to be able to take that stage and give ourselves some color shifts with the different moods for the various acts.”
The backdrop to the stage design was an ultra-wide letterbox LED screen which was used for performance content as well as video messaging. Dignitaries and world leaders including His Holiness Pope Francis, U.S. President Biden, Vice President Harris, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, French President Macron and the Prime Ministers of Norway, Spain, Canada, and Croatia made remote video appearances throughout the evening. “There were three 16:9 format screens edge to edge to edge. It was a 5mm, ROE CB5 product from Fuse Technical Group,” explains Wright. “It looked fantastic. And then we visually extended beyond the screen, to the left and right, by extending the lighting rig out. That continued the arced gesture; that arced hug around the stage.” Wright continues, “Over the stage, we had a circular truss that gave a nice downlight position and provided a position for audience lighting. It also gave us the ability to connect the floor and the sky in a way; with the circle truss above and the circle of the stage below.
Lighting Embrace
Wright has worked numerous times with lighting designer Tom Kenny and the two worked closely on the design overlaps to create a cohesive visual for Vax Live. “Tom and I worked together on the rig design,” comments Wright, “making the rig a part of the visual language of this embrace that we wanted to create for the audience. We also talked about echoing the circle of lights overhead with a ring of lights below.”
To create that echoing feel, Kenny’s lighting rig, provided by 4Wall Entertainment, included Chauvet Maverick MK3 Wash units on the overhead circular truss and on the floor in front of the stage. “Because of safety protocols, we had to leave 20-feet between the stage and the first row of the audience,” he notes. “We decided to put Mavericks on the floor in that space and shoot the light straight up, which created a great concert feel for those in attendance, while coming off very well on camera.” And like Wright, he feels, “There is an embracing sense conveyed by a circle; it’s like putting your arms around someone.”
The Vax Live concert was more in the style of a festival, with multiple acts of various musical genres performing short sets requiring the lighting design to offer a range of looks. “We lit quite a few different styles,” said Kenny. “First was Jennifer Lopez who was all gracious and warm with her mother on stage. Then we had an artsy vibe for J Balvin, a punk one for Eddie Vedder, and the pure rock of the Foo Fighters. We programmed a lot of intricate cues for J Lo and busked for the Foos, who continued performing for the pure fun of it even after the broadcast ended.”
Kenny certainly achieved his design intent, “I wanted this to feel like a concert, not a television show. All of us involved, the artists as well as the entire crew, were thrilled to be working a live show again, and I wanted our design to express this feeling. We didn’t have a massive budget, but we had massive light.”
That thrill of returning to a live show is shared by Wright, who concludes, “I’ve just never seen so many smiles on people’s faces that were on stage. And people in the audience—you couldn’t tell because they were masked—but it was so magical just seeing the pure bliss of people performing live for others. I’ll never say it was worth the wait, but it was certainly a wonderful return.”
For a list of Vax Live production credits, go to www.plsn.me/VaxLiveCrew