Katy Perry on the world's largest screen

Viva Vision is an LED canopy over Fremont Street: 419 meters long, 27 wide, suspended 27 meters up. 16.4 million pixels, 49.3 million LEDs, 5,000 nits of brightness and 600 kilowatts of concert sound; more than 24 million visitors pass beneath it every year. The viewer looks up and walks along the screen, so the image has to work along the whole length of the street, not from a single point. At the top is a render of one of the songs in the screen's native format, sped up; below is how it looks from the street.

Work on the show began in 2022, when I had access to the closed beta of DALL-E 2 — one of the first generative models that could draw from a text description. It was one of the first times a neural network was used in a production of this scale. By today's standards the quality was, as they say, potato-grade: low resolution, artifacts, random details. But for the imagination it was a breakthrough. Instead of spending weeks assembling moodboards, in one evening you could go through dozens of worlds: pink mountains in clouds out of Renaissance paintings, giants with phones, Vegas upside down, a moon that turns into a coin. We experimented as best we could — the generations became references, assets and a starting point for the 3D team.

The show is built from three hits — “Waking Up in Vegas”, “California Gurls” and “Firework” — and split into three acts. ACT 01 “Waking Up in Vegas”: objects from Katy's world fall from the sky, the sky turns into an upside-down digital Vegas with neon signs, the sun crosses the entire screen from edge to edge, the moon doubles and turns into a coin with Katy's portrait, slot machines line up along the whole street and stop on the “Perrypot” jackpot, and lips turn 3D and lip-sync to fireworks. ACT 02 “Giants World”: pink clouds and mountain peaks, candy and lollipops, giants appear from behind the mountains and take turns showing Katy's music video on their phones, while the camera flies past them into space. ACT 03 “Katy Perry’s Galaxy”: ribbons with the song lyrics and karaoke highlighting of the rhymes, cards with Katy's dancing silhouette swirling into three galaxies, astronauts with fireworks in their helmets flying toward the viewer, fragments of music videos playing on the planets — and the starry sky starts the loop again.

Each song is one seamless video without edits: the camera flies continuously through changes of location, effects and transitions, and the three songs are stitched together into one show. Inside are lip-sync, video inputs with music video footage and dozens of scene changes that had to be held in one rhythm and one light. As CG supervisor I led the assembly together with the kilim-x team and 3D generalist Juzeppe Kebap: from the assets in the pitches to the final render for the canopy geometry.

The world premiere took place on May 27, 2023, around midnight. About 30,000 people gathered on Fremont Street — a venue record for the long holiday weekend at the end of May. Katy Perry flew in over the crowd on the SlotZilla zipline in the red latex costume from her PLAY residency at Resorts World. After the premiere the show ran every day from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m., at the top of every hour.