The Creation of Dead & Company’s Stunning Sphere Visuals

If you like what you see when you check into Las Vegas’ Sphere for the residency by Dead & Company — and most attendees have come away raving, Deadheads and newbies alike — you can credit much of that to the efforts of Treatment Studio, the creative agency charged with executing the visuals for the venue’s 160,000-square-foot wrap-around screen for the three-month run. Treatment’s Sam Pattinson is the show’s executive producer but, above and beyond that, shares creative director credit with Dead & Company band member John Mayer, after a decade’s worth of collaborations with Mayer on the singer-guitarist’s solo tours.

Putting together the design for Dead & Company’s residency has been a short, not-so-strange trip. Pattinson, who co-founded Treatment with Willie Williams, U2’s longtime creative director, says that putting the visuals together was a smooth process, even though they had just six months from start to finish to make it work. “Finish” may be a misnomer since Mayer previously told Variety — and Pattinson confirms — that new video pieces will be added even as late as the last couple of weeks of the residency in August. The group plays its final night there, at least for 2024, on Aug. 10.

After previously catching up with group members Mayer, Bob Weir, and Mickey Hart for interviews about the engagement, Variety spoke with Pattinson about what went into the eye-tickling show. “I think a lot of the portals that we made, even though they’re relatively simple ideas and looks, are very effective,” he says, “with that perspective thing where we trick people into believing what they’re looking at, which is great. There also is just a sort of fun fair ride to it — the rollercoaster ride through the different tunnels and things like that. It is nice to see a real joy in the fans’ reaction to all of those moments.”

You guys had already done U2 at Sphere, and you have a longstanding relationship with John Mayer. So, without one or both of those antecedents in play, is it fair to say Dead & Company might have been considerably more difficult to pull off?

Absolutely.

How long did you actually have to pull it off before opening night in May?

John led the creative; this show is very close to his initial concept and direction. We started that conversation in November last year — which, compared to U2, is quite late. But because we learned so much on U2 about the space and rendering, it meant we could do Dead & Company sooner. With the U2 process, a lot of that time was spent on technical research and development, which we didn’t have to do for Dead & Company. All the time spent on the show was purely on creative and production.

I think a lot of artists will have to adapt to a different approach to production if they’re working in the Sphere. The rendering alone is enormous, and with the workflow chain to get anything up on the screen and delivered, you need to allow more time. When we render something on the screen here, it’s fine. You put it up on the Sphere and they’ve just got howling render errors that you can’t see here; of course, they’re 50 times higher, so they jump out a bit.

What were your biggest challenges, either from a production standpoint or a creative standpoint?

The interesting thing about working with Dead & Company is, being the band that they are, there’s no set times on songs. Some songs have set times, but they play for as long as they need to, which means that we have to accommodate that in terms of the video content. They might play a song one night for eight minutes, the next night for 12. We have to ensure that our work stays dynamic and engaging over longer periods.

Conventionally on a tour, you have one song with one piece of content, often locked to the click track. What’s exciting here is that we start a song with one piece of content and go over to another piece on a subsequent night, and then a third one sometimes. It’s very considered; it’s not just thrown in there. We find a segue and a connection between very different aesthetics. It’s worked really well.

Do you just come up with these pieces and then John Mayer or the band thinks about which will go with which songs, or do you think in the content creation process that there is a specific set of songs a visual piece could go with?

You’re right. The video content works with lots of different songs, and they need that flexibility. Some things are more uptempo, meant only for faster songs. We get a set list, in good time but not a huge amount of time before the show. We allocate where the different pieces of content go and decide what fits. There’s a real desire to refresh the show for the fans, especially those attending multiple shows over a weekend, so they’ll see something new each time.

Originally, we wanted to create between 30-40% extra content beyond what fits in a show in a given night, so we could mix it up. We included huge shifts in color palettes, creating different versions of the content, giving us more choices to allocate. It’s a really eclectic show with an eclectic body of music and content. But there is a real cohesion, and you never feel like something is out of place.

How much visual content did you create, in the end?

I think we made about five and a half hours in the end, surpassing the 40% extra goal for the three-hour show. It’s a huge body of work.

I saw the first two nights, and in seeing that there was additional visual material being added even on the second night, I wondered whether that was a desire to hold things back, or whether there might’ve even been some stuff that was not actually done by deadline. Did you just have that liberty to pull things in and out, or was there any element of still finishing things at the last minute?

It was a combination of both. We had more ideas than we could get into all the shows in the first few weeks. Certain things weren’t quite finished; they just needed more time and development. The great thing about this client and show is that wasn’t a problem, if it was on the minimal side. When we did get round to finishing the piece and getting it programmed, it was a new offering for returning fans. So, there was no pressure on that. On the whole, we had more content than we really needed for those first few weekends, continuing to add new looks throughout.

John Mayer said in his interview with us that he wanted to have fresh stuff even at the final weekends in August for the people who came early on and are coming back.

Yeah, we’ve been typically ambitious — a little too ambitious for July and August! But it’s great. We had much more content than we could initially program, and John and the team had so many good ideas that we had an excess of concepts. Usually, it’s difficult to fill a set, but John and the creative process with the artists were open-minded and supportive. It was a very constructive, positive, and easy process. It’s hard work, but creatively a great conversation.

You just worked with John on his solo tour. From photos, it looks like the visuals on that show were more abstract overall. This Dead show has abstract elements too, but also a lot of very big, easily describable, high-concept set pieces designed to command attention.

Yeah, it does. It has a different feel. People don’t often understand how good John is visually; his knowledge of art and design is very broad and deep. He’s always got an interest or a direction, often inspired by the album or music he’s doing. Shows we’ve done with him tend to be well-designed with different cultural references. But there’s plenty of humor and goofy stuff too. He references funny things from his childhood, so it doesn’t become too highbrow.

How far back do you go with John, working with him?

I didn’t meet John at the time, but I was working with the Rolling Stones on their 50th anniversary shows. John guested on that and saw our work. They got in touch and asked us to help on the “Born and Raised” tour in 2013. That was our first time working for him. There was a real filter for that album, which filtered through to the show design and video content. It’s always been a good process working with him and his team.

Let’s talk about the bookends of this show, beginning and ending with Haight Asbury and going into space in-between. Was that John’s concept, or did it come through collaboration? Also, Industrial Light & Magic worked on that. Can you talk about how those setpieces came together?

Yeah, that was 100% John’s idea. His concept is a journey, finding ways to travel to different times and places. We start with this relevant location,