Tomorrowland around the world set the standard for virtual festivals with Over 1 million viewers

July 28, 2020

Tomorrowland Around The World was the festival brand’s first foray into the digital/virtual festival experience, and true to form, it set the standard for all other virtual festivals before and after. It was a marvel of technology and experience.

To capture all the performances live, Tomorrowland built 4 different large green screen studios in Belgium (Boom), USA (Los Angeles), Brazil (Sao Paolo) and Australia (Sydney). More than 60 artists recorded their performances in those studios, including Katy Perry, David Guetta, Martin Garrix, Steve Aoki, Tiësto, Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike, Eric Prydz, Charlotte de Witte, Amelie Lens, Paul Kalkbrenner and many more. Exactly the same full-sized DJ booth was built in those 4 video studios. The sets were 6m or higher, at least 8m wide, and at least 8m in depth.

On top of the 6 4K Ultra HD cameras, a number of virtual cameras were created per stage, allowing the director to choose up to 38 cameras during the recordings.

In addition, the team at Dogstudio rendered 750 virtual lamps per stage, all drawn by hand, as well as 32,000 trees and plants and over 280,000 virtual people who each have their own individual attributes. (Fun fact: all Tomorrowland employees took part in the audio recordings.) Each outdoor stage on the island had a 16 square kilometer surface. On top of all that, special effects, spectacular fireworks, impressive laser shows and realistic crowd and sound effects were added to the DJ performances.

In total, more than 300 TB of raw footage was collected. Tens of different render engines worked for 4 weeks – 24/7 – to process all the data.

For their efforts, more than 1 million People of Tomorrow worldwide tuned in for the festival, and anyone with a weekend ticket will have the chance to revisit the island and enjoy all the individual DJ sets for two weeks from Wednesday July 29. People can also still buy a separate ticket for the Relive platform (€ 12,50) via tomorrowland.com.

Relive one of the most spectacular moments of the festival, Katy Perry closing her set with “Firework,” below.