M I C H A E L J A C K S O N ' S
H I S T O R Y T O U R
O P E N I N G 3D V R A N I M A T I O N
The animated virtual reality opening for the Michael Jackson HIStory Tour has now played, no doubt, before hundreds of thousands of screaming Jackson fans worldwide.
It was a monster 4 minutes and 14 seconds of high resolution 3D animation that, at its climax, cleverly revealed Michael Jackson exploding through the floor, live on-stage.
The animation was created by eleven different animators working simultaneously from Los Angeles, San Francisco, New Jersey and New York. Created in just under six weeks for Knotter/Palivoda Productions and See3 Inc., the creative group was managed by independent producer Glenn Abrams.
"An extended period of concept development and budget negotiations for what was originally 2 minutes of animation was followed by just two weeks of pre-production. During that time we created production offices in Santa Monica, and installed an ISDN phone line and a network of more than 14 Macintosh, PowerPC and SGI computers and other equipment.
It was a very difficult but rewarding project due to the extremely short production schedule, but it provided an opportunity to work with some of the most talented people in the live entertainment industry including Kenny Ortega and Michael Cotten (who were simultaneously working on the opening and closing ceremonies for the Atlanta Summer Olympic Games) as well as some outstanding animators including lead animator Bau Struye from See3, Jeffrey Roth from Colossal Pictures, Nick Erikson, Colie Wertz, (who recently went on to work at ILM) Trish and Scott Meyer and Kory Jones who was animating Superbowl graphics during the day for Fox TV.
Despite being a coordination nightmare, the finished animation was beautiful and sounded great!"
