Fueling the huge 16K video screens and creating compelling content for Sphere residencies in Las Vegas is a Herculean task – one that Moment Factory, in conjunction with Sphere Studios, accomplished with aplomb for the 2026 Phish concerts in this one-of-a-kind concert venue.
Live Design chats with Justin Restaino, Moment Factory's creative director/show direction, about their involvement with Phish's second Sphere residency, which launched in April 2026 and continues in July.
Live Design: How did Moment Factory get involved in the Phish residency - and when did you start working on this project?
Justin Restaino: Our relationship with Phish goes back more than ten years. We've worked together on Magnaball, Mondegreen, New Year's Eve at MSG. So by the time we got to Sphere, we weren't starting from scratch. We already spoke the same language. And with Phish, that matters enormously. The band, the fans, the music, the live show, it all has its own culture and its own rules.
In 2024 we partnered with Phish on their first Sphere residency, which was also only the second residency the venue had ever hosted. That run taught us a lot about how Phish could live inside a space like that, where the scale of the venue and the spirit of the band could actually coexist.
When they started planning for the return in August of 2025, we came back on board to build the next version. While we had a real foundation to work from, the question became: what did we learn, and how do we push it further? We wanted to stay true to what makes a Phish show a Phish show, but keep expanding what's possible inside Sphere.
LD: What is the biggest challenge for Sphere concerts?
JR: Sphere is unlike any other live entertainment canvas. The resolution is staggering, the screen wraps the entire audience, and every creative decision, from the scale, to the perspective, the motion, how an image feels when you're sitting inside it…it all has to be thought through differently than any other venue.
For Phish specifically, the challenge wasn't just technical. It was structural. Phish improvises their music, their songs mutate, and jams go places no one has ever heard before. So building visuals for Phish at Sphere meant building a system that could follow the band and not just play alongside them.
Over nine nights, they performed more than 160 songs with zero repeats. That tells you everything. We needed content and systems that could cover an enormous range of musical territory, from slow-building beautiful melodies to moments that need to explode, without ever feeling locked in or programmed. We created full immersive worlds that enveloped you as well as abstract systems that could breathe and evolve and moments that needed to be able to detonate at the peak of a jam.
That constant visual tension was the central creative problem of the whole project.
JR: Please talk about the development of the virtual light rig and what that means exactly.
I still remember seeing Phish show live at Alpharetta. The way the lights fully sucked me in during the peak crescendo of the song "Fuego," it was fully apparent we needed to recreate this for the second residency. Lighting is one of the most sacred parts of a Phish show and Chris Kuroda's work is genuinely beloved by Phish fans. So when we started thinking about Sphere, one of the first questions was: how do we bring that feeling into the screen itself?
The answer was a virtual lighting rig, and it needed to be built to be operated live, exactly like a physical one. Instead of treating the Sphere screen as a surface for playing back visuals, we built a system of 7,080 individual virtual light fixtures that could be controlled in real time.
Getting that to work at the scale of Sphere meant rebuilding major parts of the lighting system inside Unreal Engine. That took about five months, and it required tight collaboration between our real-time team, our creative team, and Chris himself.
The virtual rig has 18 unique positions, each with three alternate scales, and those positions can animate and transition between each other. Add fixture movement, gobos, animation, and different fixture types, and the range of looks becomes enormous. But what made it genuinely powerful was that it was designed to be performed in the same way Chris does for a traditional Phish show. It could react to the music, track the energy of the band, and support the kind of improvisation that defines a Phish show.
LD: How does that impact the designs by Chris Kuroda. how do the "real" fixtures interact with the virtual ones?
JR: Chris was in it with us the whole way. His work is so core to Phish's live identity that the virtual rig had to feel authentic to how he actually thinks about and performs, not just visually, but in terms of how he uses it in the moment.
A lot of the foundation came directly from the real Phish touring rig: the structure, the movement vocabulary, the timing, the relationship between lighting and music. But Sphere also gave Chris a canvas that a physical rig simply can't offer. The virtual system could stretch wall to wall, change scale instantly, create formations that have never existed in a real venue.
The key is that both systems, the real lights and virtual lights, are controlled from the same lighting console. Chris is operating the physical lights in the room and the virtual lights on screen simultaneously.
That connection is what keeps everything honest. The lighting isn't programmed to sync. It's being performed with the band, in the room, in the moment. The real and virtual rigs build together, pull back together, and hit the same peaks together.
LD: Did MF create the visuals for the 16K screens - please talk about the process - and software used.
JR: Yes, we created over 300 minutes of unique visual content for Sphere. That included both pre-rendered content and real-time systems, across a wide range of visual approaches and styles. We built large-scale 3D worlds, hand-drawn illustrations, surreal animation, abstract systems, particle simulations, real-time environments. The Gamehendge material had a completely different creative framework than the more lighting-driven or immersive pieces. Every song needed its own answer.
The process brought together artists, animators, designers, technologists, producers, and real-time developers across multiple teams over roughly six months. We worked closely with Phish and Sphere Studios throughout, so it wasn't content being made in isolation. Everything was being stress-tested against the music, the venue, and the show.
The toolset shifted depending on what each piece needed. Unreal Engine, Cinema 4D, Blender, Maya, the pipeline was flexible by design. Some content needed the precision of pre-rendered animation. Some had to stay open enough to react to whatever the band was doing that night.
And designing for Sphere changes how you think about content fundamentally. Composition, speed, camera movement, depth, detail, everything behaves differently when the audience is surrounded by a 16K canvas. We had to feel every decision from inside the venue, not just judge it on a monitor. The goal was a body of work built specifically for Phish, for Sphere, and for a live show that could genuinely be different every night.
Related content: Moment Factory Goes Phishing
Moment Factory credits list:
Creative Direction: Phish & Moment Factory Music
Creative Director and Show Direction: Justin Restaino
Content Design: Moment Factory
Lead Creative & Content Director: Manuel Galarneau
Lighting Designer: Chris Kuroda
Associate Lighting Designer: Andrew Giffin
Executive Producers: Jason Colton & Patrick Jordan
FOH Audio Mix: Garry Brown
Broadcast Mix Engineer: Vance Powell
Set Designer: Marie-Eve Pageau
Broadcast Video Director: Trey Kerr
Performed by: Phish
Trey Anastasio, Jon Fishman, Mike Gordon & Page McConnell
Management: Coran Capshaw for Red Light Management
With Jason Colton & Patrick Jordan
Production Director: Richard Glasgow
Tour Manager: Bryan "Bronko" Aiello
Production Manager: Tim Lamb
Production Coordinator: Chelsea Boisen
Moment Factory Producer: Daniel Jean
Moment Factory Music Creative Director: Tarik Mikou
Lead Line Producer: Chloé Lacroix
Creative Production Manager: James Richardson
Scenic Project Manager: Marie-Eve Pageau
Scenic Design: Xavier Mary
Draftsperson: Benoit Giguère
Screens Producer: Andreanne Lafrance
Content Programmer: Jackson Cobb
Content Coordinator: Jaimie Van Dyke
Lighting Programmer: Andrew Giffin & Andrew Kenneth
Additional Lighting Programming - Virtual Lighting Rig: Alyssa Milione
Assistant Lighting Designer - Virtual Lighting Rig: Jim Rood
Additional Lighting Design - Virtual Lighting Rig: José Antunes
Lighting Consultant - Virtual Lighting Rig: Jean-Benoit Meunier
Musical Director & Show Caller: Jeff Tanski
Additional Sound Design by LaMajeure
Sound Design & Creative Direction: Maxime Navert
Mix: Sylvain Roux & Donevan Adams
Audio Post-production: Sophie Champagne
Music Adviser: Neil Cleary
Photo Credits: Alive Coverage and Rich Fury