How Coachella's newest and most ambitious stage came together in less than 4 months

It's less than 17 hours until the gates officially open at Coachella 2024, but the design team behind the festival's new Quasar stage is still hard at work. "We've got a few more hours to go here," Heather Shaw, creative director and production designer of the stage, tells Entertainment Weekly with laugh. "We're still doing it."

This isn't the first time Shaw and her team at production design firm Vita Motus have created a massive stage for a music festival. They're behind some of the most iconic productions seen at Electric Daisy Carnival, Electric Forest, Lightning in a Bottle, and many other live performances including Cirque Du Soleil, Shakira, Kendrick Lamar, Pharrell, and even the MTV Video Music Awards. But designing Quasar — Coachella's newest and most ambitious stage that will feature extended, three-hour sets from DJs across both weekends — was Shaw's biggest challenge yet, because it all had to come together in less than four months.

"I first heard about it end of January," Shaw reveals. "So we've only been working on it for a very short amount of time. It's been a whirlwind, for sure. We're just trying to get as much done as possible in very little time."

While Shaw and her team often have to work on accelerated timelines, this was the tightest ever. But for Shaw — who has been to every Coachella since its inception in 1999, first as an attendee before collaborating on the Do LaB stage's design — getting the opportunity to debut her own stage for the first time was "massive" — especially one that's so different for the festival.

"[Coachella organizer Goldenvoice] have always wanted to go this direction, and learning about what the audience wants and listening to what the audience wants had a lot to do with it," Shaw says, adding that the success of 2023's last-minute replacement headliners Fred Again.., Skrillex, and Four Tet (after Frank Ocean suddenly dropped out of the second weekend) might have been the catalyst to cater more toward electronic fans. And while the festival's Sahara stage has historically been the home for EDM sets, Quasar will finally allow artists to "take people on a musical journey" through longer set times that are normal in that genre but have never been possible before at Coachella.

"Being able to allow the beginning, the middle, and the end of a longer set time is something that doesn't happen here," Shaw says. "A 60-minute, 90-minute set can be pretty short in this genre. It's tough for an artist to figure out what to play and so, a lot of times, they play some of the big hits, and everybody plays all the big hits. You don't really get that nice lead-in and journey."

After Goldenvoice approached Shaw and her Vita Motus team with the idea of Quasar, they had many conversations about how the design could best suit the longer sets. "The nature of it being so last minute allowed us to get really innovative with how we could deal with the different challenges that would come with a three-to-four-hour set, and what kind of content you would need for that," Shaw says. "There were limitations to how much we could accomplish in the timeline — there was definitely a lot of smart design that we were trying to employ in order to execute in time."

The first issue was figuring out if they would incorporate giant LED walls onto the stage. "The long set times require either a lot of content or no content, so we had to make a decision between having LED walls or not having LED walls at all," she explains. "But then there's also the complications of, if you don't have LED walls, you're making custom fabricated pieces, so you need more time to make those custom pieces. There was a lot of trying to figure out, back and forth, which way to go."

Ultimately they decided to create two monolithic LED walls to make up the stage — but it's going to be like nothing you've seen before. "We're rolling in digital scenic — so we made custom scenic for the walls for each artist that augments the landscape," Shaw says. "So the walls are showing the Coachella landscape, and then bringing in digital scenic."

Simply put, they’re augmenting the reality of the Coachella landscape in real time so the crowd will see an elevated version of the environment around them in sync with what the artists are playing. "We're trying to change it up," Shaw says. "We're using X-Live, which is a software that enables real-time content, and we're playing with [3D graphics tool] Unreal Engine in the walls, and it's a live Unreal Engine environment of Coachella and there's a lot of unique real-time triggers that we're able to utilize because of that software. It's pretty exciting."

And Shaw thinks they're just scratching the surface with how they can use the software to create visuals during a live performance. "It's really just touching on the very beginning of what could be, in terms of elevating the content and content creation, especially using Unreal Engine in this capacity," she says. "This is something I've wanted to do for a while, using real-time content on the walls."

At the same time that she's employing complicated technology to create the walls, she also wanted to keep the stage "really architectural and simple," asymmetrical with clean lines. "It's not easy to keep it super clean with lighting and rigging and all that comes into play, so it was another challenge," Shaw adds. "But the statement I was really trying or wanting to make was about changing up the way that we can do these shows, especially with the content and real-time augmenting the landscape, being the seed of an idea of how we can really start creating and paying attention to the design, knowing that we can really augment the space."

With so much potential for the future, Shaw hopes she and her team can continue Quasar after this year's event. But as of now, she's not sure if even the stage will return next year. "We'll see," she says with a smile. "My hope is that this is the seed of an idea that they build upon, but we don't really know yet. I think they want it to be good and they want it to be a staple, but we'll see how it goes this year."

The night before Quasar officially debuts, Shaw is feeling optimistic about how the stage is going to push Coachella into the future. "The way that they booked the lineup with headline artists being a lot of back-to-backs, and the way that they're merging the artists coming together, it's going to create a ton of amazing energy," she says. "That's going to be a really unique thing to be happening out here."

It’s something that she's excited to experience once the festival begins — because they haven’t had much time to rehearse. "We'll just be calling things in the moment," she says, explaining that she'll be working with the content teams throughout each set. "And the nature of all of the sets are really go-with-the-flow of the music, so it's not all predetermined songs that we're rehearsing. It's all going to be very in-the-moment."

Said every Coachella attendee, ever.

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