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from the tear-a-corner-off-your-DREAD-card dept.
Digital Music News has a brief mention about ABBA's new digital costumes, made by Industrial Light and Magic, which will be used at the concert tour accompanying their album release. It sounds like a similar method as was used to make Andy Serkis look like Gollum, but this time making people look younger and fresher. It's unclear whether the avatars will be mapped on the fly to real movement happening along with the concert or just running through pre-precorded routines.
Creative Director Ben Morris says his company has recreated ABBA in its prime, from 1979. "We are creating them as digital characters, then use performance capture techniques to animate them and make them look perfectly real," Morris says.
Klaxons' James Righton and Little Boots will both appear as part of the live band. The reunion will be the first in four decades with "I Still Have Faith in You" and "Don't Shut Me Down" celebrating the announcement.
The new ABBA album Voyage will contain ten new tracks, with at least one Christmas song. Will the group dethrone Mariah Carey's Christmas tradition of taking the top of the Christmas charts? I guess we'll see later this year.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 09 2021, @08:13AM (1 child)
if it's a hologram it's not a concert.
I like the new ABBA song that I listened to. But I'm disapointed by the fact that they're doing this hologram thing: if you're too old to go on tour, just say that, do a live concert in your home town that you record and people can see on TV, and be done with it.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday September 09 2021, @08:25AM
I admit I have not really been paying much attention to the whole return of ABBA. I have not even listened to the songs yet. It's not cause I don't like ABBA, they are almost always ok in my book and I like some or most of the old songs. But I was under the impression that the digital characters (or holograms or whatnot) wouldn't be the only things on stage and that they would be more like there with them, the real people, and not a replacement. Sort of like how Kraftwerk brings out their robot dummies on stage, it doesn't mean they are not there in person but they are a complement to the band. That said as with ABBA most of them are now starting to get quite old and eventually it might just be the dummies that goes on stage, and I'll probably still be there to watch them -- unless I can send my own hologram there ...