Tupac Coachella Hologram Cost Over $100,000, Probably Won’t Be Playing Your Party

If you’ve been anywhere near the internets over the past 24 hours you’ll be aware that Tupac Shakur was resurrected as a hologram during Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg’s headline performance at Coachella yesterday. Shakur, who was murdered over a decade ago in Las Vegas, addressed the audience with “What up, Coachella?” then grabbed his hologram crotch and inspired one opportunistic Twitter account and countless #thug #life hashtags as he performed “Hail Mary” and “2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted” before fading into the hologram ether or wherever it is we keep those glorified karaoke machines when they perish. But how did it all come together? With much planning on Dre’s behalf, apparently. A report published in MTV today outlines how Dre worked with San Diego production company AV Concepts to execute his best idea since Beats By Dre.

“We worked with Dr. Dre on this and it was Dre’s vision to bring this back to life,” said Nick Smith, president of AV Concepts. “It was his idea from the very beginning and we worked with him and his camp to utilize the technology to make it come to life.”

AV Concepts worked with Dre’s own production company (which should be called The Chronic, but isn’t) as well as Hollywood special effects studio Digital Domain, who had previously worked on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, TRON: Legacy and X-Men: First Class. Those are some huge accounts. Translation? Holograms cost fortune to produce.

MTV reports: “The Tupac hologram was several months in the planning and took nearly four months to create in a studio and though Smith was not able to reveal the exact price tag for the illusion, he said a comparable one could cost anywhere from $100,000 to more than $400,000 to pull off.”

Welcome to the future guys, where things generally cost a lot but some of those things are rapping 2Pac holograms.

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