Inside the Las Vegas Sphere's plans to enhance 'The Wizard of Oz' using AI
Between the venue's 160,000-square-foot screen display that anchors the visual environment and remastered songs that will play through 167,000 speakers from Sphere Immersive Sound, the enhanced version of 'The Wizard of Oz' will definitely not be in Kansas anymore when it arrives Aug. 28.
The intent, says Jennifer Koester, president and COO of the Sphere, is to answer the question, 'What would it feel like to be in Oz?'
Through the venue's haptic seats, viewers will feel the swirls of the tornado that whisk Dorothy's house to Munchkinland, smell the poppies as they envelop the room in 16K x 16K LED screen resolution, tremble a little with the Cowardly Lion and maybe make those flying monkeys feel exceptionally realistic.
Tickets to the immersive version of "The Wizard of Oz" are on sale now at thesphere.com. The film will be shown multiple times daily for an open-ended run.
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The ambitious amplification of the iconic movie is possible through a marriage between artificial intelligence and film archives from Warner Bros. and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The dual components allowed creators 'to make things that weren't possible, possible,' Koester says in a sitdown with USA TODAY, while still maintaining the integrity of the original film.
Koester uses the example of Dorothy's limbs, which, when filmed for a 4:3 aspect ratio on a standard-size movie screen in 1939, didn't always include full images.
'The original film was shot so you have a picture of Dorothy, but you don't see her hands, you don't see her legs. When you think about (the size of) the (Sphere) screen, you know her hands and legs were there and we want to show them,' Koester says. Working with additional footage that never made it into the film and set designs for the film, 'we trained (AI) models on all of that original footage. So now we can create an arm for Dorothy or fill in her legs from that AI model.'
In addition to the visuals, the original songs from the film including treasured favorites 'We're Off to See the Wizard,' 'Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead' and Judy Garland's timeless 'Over the Rainbow,' have been remastered and their orchestrations rerecorded.
Koester says an 80-piece orchestra was brought to the original MGM scoring stage near Los Angeles to redo the entire soundtrack, which, when combined with the Sphere's haptics, will augment the immersive experience.
'Imagine the feeling you can evoke because you're coming down the yellow brick road into the spooky forest,' Koester says. 'And to your left you're hearing spooky sounds and then maybe some of the flying monkeys on your right. It's the evocation of feeling that becomes so possible because of the technology that exists in that venue.'
The all-encompassing experience will carry a ticket price of $104, which aligns with the current Sphere films 'Postcard from Earth' from filmmaker Darren Aronofsky and 'V-U2,' the startlingly lifelike concert film taken from U2's Sphere-opening residency.
As with all things related to the venue, it isn't about the experience you think you know, it's about the unexpected.
Koester hints that the immersions will begin as soon as you enter the Sphere and walk into its cavernous atrium that will 'transform you into the world of Kansas" and later, "when you exit the (seats) and you've been through Oz, there's going to be some really innovative and interactive activations.'
The venue is promoting its Sphere-icized 'Wizard of Oz' with an outdoor installation suggesting that the venue has landed atop the Wicked Witch of the East, complete with her 50-foot-long legs and 22-foot-tall ruby slippers extended onto the ground. The legs will be on view all the time, but daily photo opportunities on the Sphere campus are subject to times listed at thesphere.com.
'It's larger than life,' Koester says, 'and just a hint to what's about to happen inside.'
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