LONDON – The biggest Brazilian live DJ show in 2020 took place in xR, as local DJ and musician Alok attracted 750,000 people to his “Alive” livestream in December, also clocking seven million views on YouTube. The disguise xR workflow drove the music special with a vx 4 media server and two rx platforms enabling the show to incorporate content from leading render engines Unreal, Unity and Notch.
Alok is one of the most prominent icons in the Brazilian electronic music scene. He was named by Forbes Brazil as one of the most influential people under 30 in the country. Following the cancellations of all his live shows last year, the aim of the xR live stream was to bring a fresh way of broadcasting the artist’s performance to his large fanbase.
Project Director Fabio Soares from OkeStudio along with TheForce invited Sao Paulo-based, full-service AV company Maxi to provide the xR workflow for the show, along with disguise workflow specialist Tito Sabatini on technical support. The special immersed Alok in dynamic, ever-changing environments featuring colorful forests of stylized mushrooms and trees, galactic particle streams, synapses, shimmering ice shards, cities that build and dissolve.
Support from disguise “was something we couldn’t live without,” Jose Augusto Martins, Executive Director at Maxi, reports. “With a big project like this and all the tech video crew learning how to use xR, disguise’s support was key. It gave us the confidence to run things properly. We wanted people to feel the energy of a real show and that was achieved.
“‘Alive’ was a huge xR project, and we were doing it for the first time in Brazil, so we learned a lot during the process of making the project a reality,” Martins adds.
Maxi was the only rental company with the toolset to deliver the xR production, he notes. As the technical brief required the use of all three key render engines Unreal, Unity and Notch, plus multiple camera switching with four tracked cameras using the Estabili tracking system, disguise was the only tool capable of delivering the brief, Tito explains. “It’s render agnostic and could handle multiple camera switching, timecode following DJ cues and more.”
The team at Maxi were faced with a tight deadline to learn the pipelines for all three render engines and set up tracking for four cameras, while also helping everyone involved to understand the xR workflow and how it makes virtual production possible.
“This was a huge production, and the dedication of everyone involved made it happen,” Tito notes. “After the show, Alok’s manager and crew were very emotional, relieved and happy. Public feedback was amazing as well; people from the industry in Brazil came to congratulate us, and that was a nice feeling to have after such a bad year for the music industry.”
Jose believes that xR has a bright future in the live music market, bringing presenters and artists to any environment possibly imagined. “I think this is a technology that makes everyone say, ‘Wow!’” Maxi already has ticked another xR gig off the calendar as rapper Criolo live streamed a concert special in Extended Reality on 23 January.