Taylor says that in the making of the album, Glover invited band members to the studio where he and his producer would experiment with new sounds and vintage instruments.

The team used Microsoft’s OneNote for pre-production and design to build out the show.

“OneNote helped us trade updates and kept the team in sync through the entire creative process,” Taylor says. “We may have had an ocean between us at times but we were easily updated with OneNote.”

Warren says Glover had the show “in his head” and used Kinect sensors to create characters with movement and motion. He and another dancer recorded the 18 characters who made up the show, which devoted a full set to perform the album. To clean up all the data involved in the production, they processed the information through Azure, and then added custom animations to bring the characters to life. They used the Unity game engine to run the show from a Surface tablet. All this took just weeks, instead of months, since they didn’t have to do animation by hand.

“I enjoyed creatively collaborating. There was a lot of give and take. Compromise and accountability is key when working creatively with another team and Microsoft was able to be a great partner in this way,” Taylor says. “Microsoft brought a wealth of technology that allowed for the 4D capture of Donald. They also worked closely on the content production pipeline as well as the VR capture and VR app. Microsoft was able to capture such an accurate representation of the event in VR. It’s special that we can share this show with all of our fans after it is long over.”

He adds, “Technology is an important tool that we use to enhance our marketing efforts and live performances. It’s important to make sure that technology serves a function and is not just being used because it’s available. It allows fans that didn’t trek to the desert to be able to live in the world of ‘Awaken My Love’ from afar!”

Event photos above by Ibra Ake [Wolf + Rothstein].