BACKSTREET BOYS AT SPHERE, LAS VEGAS

When Silent House and BLINK teamed up with Sphere Studios to design the immersive visuals behind Backstreet Boys’ residency at Sphere in Las Vegas, they made a deliberate effort to go far beyond relying simply on late-90s and early-2000s nostalgia. From the outset, they chose a clear-cut narrative: a journey through outer space commencing in a futuristic particle accelerator, zooming through galaxies and past planets, culminating at a nightclub aboard a spaceship.

The team knew they wanted to integrate live cameras, but they needed to figure out a clever way to do so on Sphere’s world-famous 16K screen without mere picture-in-picture frames. In other words, it couldn’t feel like a typical “IMAG show.” The BLINK team used Notch to place performer feeds into each environment, mapping band members onto spaceship windows, city buildings, and architectural elements that felt germane to each phase of the show. Through each ballad, for instance, they appeared within constellation formations; in the cyber-futuristic sequence of "Get Another Boyfriend," live feeds populated buildings and bridges throughout the digital cityscape created by Sphere Studios.

But the work didn’t begin and end simply with the performance itself. The team also created something of a warm-up for the audience. As BLINK’s Tom Colbourne explains, “We knew content would be playing onscreen for over an hour as people walked in, so we decided to place Easter eggs, stats about the band, and little points of interest everywhere.”

With Notch’s multifaceted NURA system and real-time rendering abilities, the crew could test onsite effortlessly, iterating over and over, adjusting effects, placements, and 3D tracking to taste without any difficulty—even at Sphere’s monumental scale.

Additional press coverage:

The Hollywood Reporter, USA Today.