Art direction for the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards, reimagined for awards shows in the time of Covid-19, was handled with panache by an all-star team including production designer Misty Buckley of Misty Buckley Design and lead art director Kristen Merlino of Paperweight, Inc, with art directors Gloria Lamb and Matt Steinbrenner rounding out the team. Live Design chats with Buckley, Merlino, and Lamb on various aspects of this live-for-broadcast production aired on Sunday March 14, 2021 on CBS, as held in and around the Los Angeles Convention Center and Staples Center.
Live Design: What was the design concept for the inside stage and outside "garden" settings—clearly the pandemic made things very different from usual?
Misty Buckley: When I was first approached by executive producer Ben Winston, we initially discussed a different approach to the Grammys from previous years. Weeks later, we went in to full lockdown… and within months were facing a very different world in the music and entertainment business. Last year we saw a lot of political unrest, as well as the global health situation, and with the Grammys being the biggest night in music, Ben and I discussed at length how the situation was making everyone feel from a performer and audience perspective. We both agreed that people needed to feel hopeful and joyful as we head in to a new year. I went away and sketched the initial concept of a huge explosion of colourful flowers bursting from a brass gramophone. I felt that with a center piece representing color and positivity, we could build the rest of the performances around that. Ben and I both grew up in the UK with Jools Holland’s show as the benchmark of really amazing music performed by musicians in a 360-degree environment. We love the intimacy of that and the support musicians give each other whilst they each perform. We agreed that drawing inspiration from this was the solution to not having an audience, by letting the artists and performers become the audience for each other. I took the motifs of the warm brass and created a faceted multi-stage space, which echoed the shape of the gramophone. The wooden floor referenced the warm wooden textures found in legendary recording studio environments like Abbey Road, Motown studios and Muscle Shoals, to name a few. Once I had a palette of warm brass, warm wood and the color of the flowers, I was able to form the shape of the space. This required a lot of back and forth with white models to get the space right. The stages had to be large enough to social distance, whilst also feel intimate. As I wasn’t able to attend a site recce due to travel restrictions, I placed a lot of trust in lead art director, Kristen Merlino and hoped I had communicated the concept of the design to her effectively enough. She of course, completely understood and was incredibly respectful of the design intention.
In early January, the pandemic was pretty bad in LA and the Grammys made the decision to push the show to March, which felt like the right thing to do. At this point we re-evaluated the awards environment and how we were going to resolve the design. Ben always knew that he wanted to present the awards with the Staples building (home of the Grammys in a normal year), in view. The desire for this particular view, combined with the need for a more open and airy environment to safely seat nominees in close proximity, lead us down the route of an exterior, open sided tent. We created a magical outside garden with wooden floors, flowers, plants, trees and festoons which reflected in the clear of the tent… creating a beautiful starry night sky regardless of the weather. The result was a flow of concept… the inside studio environment with the exterior enchanted garden connected by a path for the presenter, Trevor Noah, to go between the two spaces seamlessly.
Live Design: For the live performances what were the major set pieces, where were they built, and was there automation, stage crew?
Gloria Lamb: There were a lot of big looks this year. With so many significant builds in a short period of time, we had to engage several Los Angeles shops. I think the show stoppers included Megan Thee Stallion’s sparkly yellow Cab Calloway inspired grand staircase (Global Entertainment), Cardi B’s giant shoe with cash blowing platform and stripper pole stiletto along with oversize bed (ShowFX), Taylor Swift’s cottage surrounded by lush greens (Vision Scenery), Dua Lipa’s white and chrome nightclub complete with lasers (JetSets), Harry Styles 12’ chrome orb surrounded by radial rays of lights (The Scenic Route), and Billie Eilish’s dock with sunken car (JetSets).
Due to doing the show in the LA Convention Center, we had extremely limited rigging. Aside from some soft goods for Megan Thee Stallion, there was no rigging or automation available for any of the performances. We had to get creative with some of our taller items. For example, the lighting towers for Dua Lipa were each raised by a vermette lift and anchored through the floor to supports under the show deck. To achieve the height of Cardi’s shoe, the foot was built as inflatable (by Landmark Creations) that raised once in position.
Live Design: How did the design team work together remotely in advance?
Kristen Merlino: The entirety of the design prep process for this show was done remotely. Typically we would all be in one office together in constant contact all day long, which was obviously not possible this year. Misty and I needed to develop a process that not only worked remotely, but that worked with the time difference between the US and the UK. Video chats and screen sharing became the most frequent form of communication. My office could share drawings with Misty at the end of our day and know that we would have updates and feedback by the start of our next work day.
Weekly video chat meetings with the producers and the creative team were also key to allowing everyone to successfully work remotely. It became a very efficient way to get everyone on the same page by simply screen sharing all of our creative documents together for a few hours each week.
Internally, our team also had regular video chats to catch up and talk through whatever current challenges needed to be faced each day. Gloria, Matt, and I were in constant communication and relied heavily on organized shared paperwork to make sure that all elements of every performance were being addressed. As Gloria mentioned, the three of us have a lot of history working together, and that shorthand is invaluable on a project of this scale. Especially in this remote setting, we all needed to rely on a certain level of trust between us.
Gloria Lamb: Most of us have experience working together from numerous projects over the years, which was a great foundation. Kristen, Matt, and I would regularly discuss the scope of work and aim to split the tasks in a way that didn’t leave any one person buried. Matt and I divided up the performances between us, but maintained regular check ins with Kristen and each other, especially as it pertained to prioritizing the work of the rest of our team.
I don’t think remote working would be quite as seamless without programs such as Dropbox, Zoom, and Google Docs! We utilized shared Dropbox for all of our CAD drawings, research, renderings, show rundowns, and more.
Google spreadsheets were invaluable as a way of tracking performance details. We tracked progress from concept through drawings, budgeting, and approval. This shared resource allowed us to have this simplified view of the information available to other departments such as lighting, FX, staging, stage management and more… all updated in real time. Zoom has been a great tool for meetings. Being able to share screens and even add annotations during meetings has been a game changer. We made use of this tool not just within our department and for large production meetings, but also in meetings with the shops and with creative directors. While long days filled with Zoom can be exhausting, overall it has saved us time commuting between meetings and shops, and allowed for quick and clear checkins on a more frequent basis that without it.
LD: Kristen, What is your role as lead art director? How do you collaborate with Misty, and how does your team collaborate with Noah Mitz for the lighting and Drew Findley as screens producer.. does your team create the video content?
Kirsten Merlino: My role is to take Misty’s concept and create the “bones” of the show. The process started with Misty sharing the core conceptual values of the design, and then I started to develop a ground plan that could both service the creative needs of the design as well as the necessities of live music performances. We shared a countless number of white 3D models back and forth. I would try something in ground plan and Misty would take it, adjust and refine it, and then send it back to me. We went back and forth that way for several weeks until we felt like we had achieved the right path forward.
Once a ground plan is established, it’s my job to oversee what we call the “basic set”, which is the world that all of the performances live within. A show with more than twenty music performances requires a complex infrastructure to run smoothly, and I need to develop that infrastructure while also servicing the creative needs of the set.
It is also my responsibility to staff the art department and to oversee the execution of the performances. We had an amazing performance art direction team, lead by Gloria Lamb and Matt Steinbrenner, who are the ones that bring all of the artist’s creative ideas to life. We had regular check-in meetings with each other so that I could keep an ear out for any big picture concerns, or issues that needed to be discussed with the producers. My role is to keep in constant communication with my own team and the other departments to be sure that information is flowing and that we are actively solving problems before scenery gets to our stage.
We all need to work closely with Noah and his team throughout the development of the basic set as well as the performances. No set is successful without the thoughtful integration of lighting and that takes a good deal of collaboration. We always want to build scenery with lighting in mind and we share drawings of everything back and forth before anything actually gets built. Noah’s team is very actively involved as we develop sets for construction, and we work together to find the best solutions for building lights in to scenery, or building custom frames that support creative arrangements of lighting fixtures.
Our team didn't create the video content. Drew’s team will create any custom content, and he will also manage content brought in by individual artist teams.
LD) What was the most challenging thing about this year in terms of the design? And the most rewarding?
Misty Buckley: We are all so used to designing and delivering large scale events in large spaces for thousands of people, so it really was a huge challenge to attempt to design a show the size of the Grammys and give it scale and impact, without the arena environment we're so accustomed to. Whilst the circumstances were enormously challenging, it did force us to focus and really draw from the emotional side of the last year, creating a warm and intimate design for viewers to feel like they were at the centre of. Kristen and I hadn’t worked together before, so we not only had to resolve the design entirely remotely but we had to establish our own language of communication and shorthand with each other, whilst living through our own pandemic scenarios. We basically set up a 24 hour work cycle of us both delivering new work for each time the other woke up which flowed pretty smoothly… with a few laughs along the way!
Kristen lead an incredible art department and between them they managed to realize both the main set and all of the artist’s creatives without compromising on scale or ambition… and as Kristen said, we really had an extraordinarily creative and talented team of producers, technicians and production and more.
I think one of the big successes is this modern way of working, where thirty or so of us would all meet weekly on Zoom from different parts of the world… and everyone gets a voice and gets to look in to each others eyes and establish connection and respect with a team. So when we all met on site after a year of this process, it felt like we were all old friends. I think that warmth and love emanated from the show.
Kristen Merlino: The biggest challenge for me this year was finding a way to create a ground plan that could facilitate four full scale, live performances at once, while maintaining the intimacy and relationship between Artists that was so critical to the show’s concept. Not letting the function of the space overtake the creative vision was one of the most difficult challenges.
The most rewarding thing about this year was working with an amazingly talented team that was uncompromising about the creative vision for the show. From the producing team down, I don’t think we could have asked for better partners and collaborators. The production team really clicked and that really adds a layer of joy to the process.
Click here to enlarge Grammy Ground Plot
Credits:
Executive Producer: Ben Winston
Co-Executive Producer: Jesse Collins
Co-Executive Producer: Raj Kapoor
Production Designer: Misty Buckley
Art Director: Kristen Merlino
Art Directors: Gloria Lamb, Matt Steinbrenner
Lighting Designer: Noah Mitz
Screens Producer: Drew Findley
Audio Producer: Michael Abbot