In the beginning, there was light.

Specifically, Josh Beard, co-founder of SICK DESIGN – a high-profile concert design agency with many well-known celebrity events in its portfolio – began his career in 2007 in Houston, Texas, working as a lighting technician at what would become one of the largest churches in the United States. Up in the catwalks, he was hands-on with the gear, familiarizing himself with the basics of lighting and rigging. In 2009, Beard transitioned from lighting for the sermons to lighting for the screens, making the switch to broadcast television, where he taught himself the ins and outs of programmable lighting design. Soon afterward, he again stepped into a whole other industry: live events, concerts, and touring, putting the skills he accrued to the test on the open road, having come a long way from the church catwalks. “It was a fun process,” Beard recalled. “Because I don’t like heights.”

But more importantly, these career shifts taught him a valuable skill: the distinction between lighting for the stage and the screen; live in-person events that utilize massive venues with hundreds of seats, versus the living room television. Different philosophies were at play. How were the subjects to be lit? Were they to be static or mobile? What was the intended viewing angle?

The presence of a screen determined the answer to those questions, and in the touring world, all that mattered was the stage. “At the time in 2017, most shows weren’t caring too much about how it looked on camera,” said Beard.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic brought everything to a standstill. “Everything kind of stopped in both worlds,” Beard continued. “But a few months after COVID hit, around mid 2020, I started working with a friend out of New York, a multi-cam director who was working with Vevo at the time. They were doing these live-to-tape music specials, four to five songs each. It was almost like a music video; the quality was certainly there, but it was more about the performers above all else. And it was all happening in real-time, just a steady shot of an entire song. It was definitely a weird overlap at first because I didn’t originally come from film.”

With the pandemic-era pause in production came innovation, and soon, the rapid prevalence of LED panel technology. Jon Favreau’s Star Wars series The Mandalorian, which had premiered months prior in 2019 on the Disney+ streaming service, popularized a new medium of virtual production utilizing LED screens, rendering landscapes of alien planets in real-time behind and around the actors. It was taking the matte paintings and film projections of Hollywood’s past and applying them to modern-day digital displays. Though similar technology had been used in prior productions, a notable example being the 2013 thriller Gravity, directed by Alfonso Cuarón, The Mandalorian defined virtual production as the industry knows it today.

And in the months and years following, this technology suddenly found use beyond a galaxy far, far away and, more notably, beyond Hollywood.

Alex Lindsay, an alumnus of Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic with a longstanding career in broadcast media, VFX, and live events, had a front-row seat to these post-pandemic industry shifts.

“We’re all using the LED walls now. The crossover is definitely there,” mused Lindsay. “Though the ones we use in concerts are often at a lower resolution than the ones we use for film. That’s because these venues use these giant, giant displays, and having those massive screens at a higher resolution would be both expensive and a power distribution issue.”

Despite those differences, the overlap nonetheless exists: technology previously meant for the screen now aids and elevates productions for the stage, able to be loaded onto road-ready trucks, assembled, and disassembled at a moment’s notice.

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Lindsay further elaborates on the practical applications of this tech, “The primary thing about events is that everything has to be working in real-time. So most of the time, everything is time- based. You’re trying to figure out, for instance, when you want to do replays or play-outs, so we’re using things like an EVS video production solution. When we’re working on these live events, we’re able to use that EVS to cut and edit certain things in real-time and then deliver them as soon as possible. Additionally, to get these edits out quickly, we build these subsystems for our editors to work with. In the past we used products such as Jellyfish from OWC.”

The pandemic witnessed the hybridization of production. All of a sudden, specialized tools began to see a more generalized use, and skills became cross-disciplinary. The hierarchies and crew structures of a concert further resembled those of a Hollywood blockbuster or a bustling television broadcast. Control rooms further blur the line between stage and screen production, utilizing tech from providers such as Grass Valley, Blackmagic, and Sony, including switchers, cameras, multiviewers, and playback servers.

And with the rising prevalence of LED displays, events are now illuminated with screens in mind. The intended viewing angle was no longer only from the designated spectator seats. The distinction has blurred beyond recognition.

Steve Williams, fellow co-founder of SICK DESIGN, had the opportunity to immerse himself in this convergence alongside Beard, taking advantage of this cross-pollination of technology and discipline to elevate the events their design firm undertakes. “There was a time when we couldn’t ever take the technology from the live world into film,” he reflected. “Now, with these big virtual production studios, like Trilith in Atlanta, the technology is suddenly cross- compatible, which just wasn’t a thing five years ago.”

“But now we’re seeing everything brought closer together. We’ve seen yearly increases in the quality of LED screens, both in resolution and color output. Pixel pitch has also reduced. Recently, we were working on a project that heavily utilized LED displays, and that tech was the same kind you’d see being used in virtual productions to help shoot a Marvel movie. The refresh rates, the pixel pitch, it’s all better than ever. Those LED screens that are in the background of every single pop show these days? Not only do they look good live, but they still look good if you point a phone camera at them.”

In the beginning, there was light.

And as these roads of creativity and ingenuity converge into one, that light is elevated beyond what was once thought possible. The past five years of technological hybridization represent a period of rapid innovation and collaboration across multiple industries. It is also symptomatic of the challenges that had gripped these creative fields during that same timeframe, necessitating the sharing of skills, the sharing of tools, and, of course, the sharing of light: the light of the overhead catwalk lamps, the light of the vibrant LED displays illuminating the performers from behind, and the light of indomitable creative spirits.