Kenny Chesney Residency at Sphere
(2025 and 2026) Colorist, Sphere Studios
Grading a live residency for the world's largest screen.
Intro
Live residencies at Sphere bring a different set of demands than a fixed feature like The Wizard of Oz. The visuals are built to move with the performance, shifting and immersive, and the grade has to hold up night after night, show after show, at a scale where every choice is magnified.
Built for the room, not just the screen
Content for a residency like this is shaped as much by the experience of being inside Sphere as by the image itself. Color, contrast and saturation all have to read correctly at 240 feet tall, while still carrying the energy of a live show. What looks bold and vivid on a reference monitor can turn overwhelming, or fall flat, once it's wrapped around an audience.
A live show also means the picture is never just the content. Camera footage of the band (IMAG) plays in front of the background plates, so every grade has to work with what's layered on top of it, not just on its own.
What made this one different
A fix in the grade, not a trip back to VFX
Kenny liked the lighting rigs in two of the background plates, but didn't want the Sphere structure visible behind them. The usual answer would have been to send the shots back to VFX for a full rework.
Instead, we made a grading adjustment on the spot that pulled the structure back and kept the rigs intact. Shaun Silva, the show's creative director, showed the change to Kenny the next morning. It saved time for production and for the artist, and because I could grade against the live IMAG composite, I was judging the finished picture, not a guess at it.
Where LastLight started
The main grade for the residency was done in Baselight, as all my Sphere work is. But this was the first client project where I also trimmed the grade live on the media plane, using Pomfort's LiveGrade for the small last-minute adjustments there was no time to re-work and render again.
Seeing how much that last step helped, for the client and for the show, is what prompted me to build my own tool for it. It's called LastLight, and it's in development now.