'Audio waves ripping through the arena': behind the epic set for MTV's VMAs 2023

What will 2023 be remembered for? For my money, it will be the year of corporations embracing self-reflexive irony. First, there was Barbie, a movie funded by Mattel in which Mattel turned out to be the bad guys. Then came MTV's VMAs, in which Fall Out Boy performed a revamp of Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire featuring the line 'YouTube killed MTV'. (Check it out: the best place to see it is on, erm, MTV's YouTube channel.)

Nostalgia and parody aside, the band do have a point. Once upon a time, MTV was pretty much the only place to see your pop heroes play. Since the birth of YouTube, though, you've been able watch your faves 24 hours a day online. So you wonder: what's the point of MTV in 2023, exactly?

One answer to that question is, indeed, to watch the VMAs (Video Music Awards). This annual event brings together the world's top pop talent in one arena, launching a million gossip columns in the process. And it's not just about who wins: leading artists also get to strut their stuff on stage and give the kind of performance you simply won't see anywhere else. So if you're a fan of stars like Olivia Rodrigo, Doja Cat, Nicki Minaj, Megan Thee Stallion, Lil Wayne or Måneskin, it's a real must-see.

At the same time, the scale and complexity of the event make it an incredible challenge to produce. Especially when you consider the number of egos involved... and not to mention that it's being broadcast live.

All of this makes it quite incredible that the MTV VMAs 2023, held last week at the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey, ran so smoothly. Not only that but for pop fans, it was a thrill ride from start to finish, sparking with the kind of chaotic and authentic energy that a polished music video simply can't match.

So I was intrigued to know, quite frankly, how MTV pulled it off. To get a glimpse into the creative process behind the VMAs 2023, I chatted with production designer Matt Steinbrenner and lighting designer Tom Sutherland.

How to please everybody

If you think about it, creating the visuals for a festival is tough enough, but at least there's a clearly identifiable headliner at which you can throw all your bells and whistles. At the VMAs, in contrast, everyone wants their show to be the most spectacular. And that presents quite the challenge, explains Tom.

"I heard a great line that a friend said last night: 'Everyone's a mini Super Bowl now'," he chuckles. "And it's true. Everybody wants their performance to be like a Super Bowl performance. And this year, we had more creative input from the acts than ever before."

Sometimes, however, that meant having to push back. "For this year's show, for instance, Shakira's first creative was so ambitious, there were certain things that we had to strike because there was no way we could achieve it in a nine-minute changeover," he recalls. "It just wasn't physically possible to do some of the things she wanted. So you do sometimes have to talk to the artist and bring it back into reality. But that's pretty hard to do; it's a tricky part of the job."

Of course, you don't say no to Shakira – or Doja Cat, or Lil Wayne, or anyone else in pop's Premier League – lightly. But nor would Matt or Tom want to.

"We have to be realistic, but also without stifling their particular creative vision for their performance," explains Matt. "So it is a delicate balance. Because what makes the VMAs the VMAs is that they let things happen on stage that most other shows wouldn't entertain. So that means having to bounce between taking the risk and pulling back to a safe place we know we can achieve within the context of the 15 other performances happening in the room."

Part of that is simply ensuring the shows don't look too similar. Sometimes, that's not a problem because everyone's going in different directions. "But I can say we definitely get some duplicate ideas," says Matt. "So we have to nudge people in the right direction. And we'll say, 'Okay, we see a lot of fire effects in your creative. Another act's doing a heavy-fire look'. And often, that's enough to help people move off an idea because no one wants to look like another artist on the show."

He adds that putting together so many spectacular performances, such as Olivia Rodrigo's real-life recreation of her Vampires video complete with fake collapsing set, is doubly tricky given the timeframe. Quite simply, the teams don't know which pop stars are appearing, let alone what songs they'll play, until shortly before the event. So everyone has to work very fast indeed.

The timeframe from hell

Take Shakira's career-spanning medley, which incorporated belly dancing, multiple dancers and set changes, and was widely considered to be the performance of the night. "We realistically had three hours to put together a 10-minute performance of that across all the three stages," says Tom. "And we had to make sure that everything looks really theatrical and different, so she could keep telling the story of her career within these 10 minutes. That was a real standout moment for me, where everything blended so well."

Perhaps surprisingly, though, Matt says the most creatively challenging section was also the most static: Nicki Minaj's calm and statuesque rendition of Last Time I Saw You.

"Scenically, we had a lot of challenges with the scope of production for some of the artists: a lot of them were really large scenic pieces," he explains. "And Nicki had a very different type of performance from anything that we've seen of her before, having her high stationary on this geometric platform. Really, the entire design was one set piece, and Tom's lighting and a lot of fog."

"It sounds like a simple idea," he adds, "but when you're in an arena that's as large as the Prudential Centre, things like air movement and quality of fog and atmospherics in the room is a real risk. So I'm glad we pulled it off because I think it looked very beautiful and came across great on camera."

Equaliser bars frozen in time

We could spend all day talking about the individual performances, sets and lighting on the night. But what really brought everything together was Matt's overarching set design for the arena, which was as original as it was epic.

It was based, Matt reveals, on the idea of super-powerful audio waves ripping through the arena and sculpting the environment. "The iconic 35-foot tall 'Moon Person' helmet appears as if the power of sound was so intense that it carved its waves into the metal, etching an entirely new version of the distinctive MTV award," he explains. "The chrome Moon Person’s visor appears to be shaped by equaliser bars frozen in time, creating a central portal from which the celebrity presenters emerged."

Arcing over the Moon Person sculpture, meanwhile, was a video installation designed to evoke the movement of audio waves through the air, visually connecting the two performance stages anchored at opposite ends of the arena.

"Both performance stages featured LED floors and massive bi-parting LED walls with integrated lighting, intermixing the two media as if audio waves left their indelible mark as they flowed through the space," he adds.

It's quite a trippy idea, so was it difficult getting the client to sign off on it? "Actually, MTV gave me very wide creative freedom on this project," he replies. "The only stipulation was that the structure of the room remains consistent from the past few years, which is the two identical stages at either end of the arena, and then some type of central award stage, an iconic VMA-specific, scenic piece.

"From that point forward, I just came up with my own design language, my own narrative. And that carried through not only the design of the scenic pieces themselves but also coming up with some ideas of how we could integrate some of the vertical bars from this idea of equaliser bars and work that into the performance stages, giving us an additional bit of canvas for lighting, as well as breaking up some of the video surfaces that are the background of the stages."

Design process

How, I ask, do these designs come about in practice? Does he develop them through 2D drawings, 3D models, or just sharing concepts and getting others to build them? "It's a bit of all of those things, actually," Matt reveals.

"I primarily start with just sketching in a drawing programme on my iPad, just very 2D, working in ground plan and elevation form, just to get some shapes and a language that feels right and see if any of those things start to get some traction in my mind. And then, I'll use that to throw it into 3D, using a modelling program called Vectorworks 3D. My assistants and I will model that idea into three-dimensional forms. And that gives us a chance to modify things and share it with different departments; take camera views within that 3D model to see how it will translate to the TV."

That's when Tom comes in. "My job really starts once Matt's off to the races," he explains. "Once he's got his idea, we then go back and forth and communicate about what will and won't work and what I need to add to his plans to achieve the lighting vision for it."

None of that, he stresses, was easy. "The curves and the rigging that we had to achieve on this particular design was pretty ambitious, so there was a lot of back and forth between our teams to try and get it there. But I feel the shape, depth and perspective that we achieved meant everything came out into the room from every angle and shot. It was telling a different story. It's something that really worked."

"We like to throw out the rule book."

The reason they made it work, fundamentally, lies in the philosophy of the VMAs. As Tom describes it: "It always has to be bigger. It always has to be better. And then you always find ways to figure it out. So, every year comes with its own surprises."

Matt adds: "The hardest thing about VMA design is that we like to reinvent the show year after year. So we need to take the idea of something successful and build on it, but not repeat it exactly. Because the last thing we want is for people to feel like it's the same show as last year.

"So I think that's the fun part of the VMAs," he adds. "Unlike many other shows where it's a bit 'rinse and repeat' and more formulaic, the beauty of the VMAs is that we like to throw out the rule book. And sometimes we throw out some of the things we did really well the last time; you have to find ways to reinvent that success in a new context, with new visuals. A new geometry or architecture in the room to help define one year from the previous."

One element of that for Tom is making use of new tech. "We were on a brand new version of lighting system software this year, a system called GrandMA3," notes Tom. "And we used that to create more interesting effects throughout the entire show. I think we were actually the first major US award show to move onto that."

The same goes for Matt. "Scenic technology is advancing in the sense that there's so much more 3D carving," he explains. "For example, that entire helmet was CNC 5Axis carved foam that had a steel frame inside. The shapes and the things we can create are almost limitless now because the scenic builds technology has become much more advanced.

"I'd also point to our increasing ability to pre-vis things," he adds. "Between Tom's department and my department, everything's so fleshed out as 3D models during the design process that when we get to visualising the show, we can get pretty darn accurate with camera angles, different lighting techniques, surface materials, things like that. So, it leaves a lot fewer open questions as we get into the arena. We've done our homework as much as possible."