Bruce Rodgers of Tribe, Inc. is a veteran when it comes to Super Bowl Halftime Shows, with 19 now under his belt. In a 32-minute NFL documentary, Rodgers and other members of the design and production team discuss how the on-field set for Kendrick Lamar's remarkable performance comes together in just eight minutes after months of planning and building.
Live Design chats with Rodgers about this challenging project in the Q&A below.
Check out the documentary:
Bruce Rodgers: A Documentary On The Production Design Of The Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show
Live Design: What made this year's show challenging?
Bruce Rodgers: The Apple Music Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show, starring Kendrick Lamar was more of a spiritual quest than any other halftime show design I've been a part of.
With Kendrick and his design team pgLang led by Dave Free and the production designer Mike Carson, choreographer Charm LaDonna and field cast producer KP Terry, as well as our team that includes director Hamish Hamilton and his excellent camera team, LD's Al Gurdon and Cory FitzGerald, our producers at ROC NATION, Jesse Collins Entertiainment and DPS, and Aaron Cooke, along with the design team at All Access and our Halftime show staging team we combined all our efforts to focus on getting what I consider the largest set design footprint of any Super Bowl Halftime show on and off the field is record time.
LD: How did your "Tribe" collaborate with Kendrick's team on the show design?
BR: We had surveyed and studied the Caesars SuperDome Stadium for about two months prior to knowing that Kendrick would star in the halftime show. The stadium had gone under major renovations and was looking and functioning great but still had it's inherent characteristics with it's super high ceiling and high audience sightlines and it's single south end tunnel that we were familiar with when we designed the SBXLVII Halftime show with Beyonce in 2013.
When we learned that Kendrick was official I knew from experience that this would be a different kind of presentation having worked with Kendrick and Dave Free on the Dr Dre and friends SBLVI Halftime show in 2022. And adding Mike Carson to their team was a welcome sight as I've known Mike and worked with him on a handful of projects. I knew their combined brainpower and creative thinking would make for something special and I was determined to support what I knew would be a special vision.
Having been fortunate to design 19 consecutive SB Halftime shows I've seen it all with artist camps that ask for the impossible. In the Kendrick Lamar creative case it was a partnership from the get go. In the early stages we debated about scale and sightlines and field cast counts. We shared examples of past shows and talked mechanics and weights of quick deploy carted stages, camera positions, and costs. We touched on new technologies and colors and how their story was to be told "thru the lens" for the 133.5 million TV viewers and simultaneously to the 80,000 person live audience. Part of my job is to fold in our various team members and show vendors, coordinators, riggers, audio, and lighting and staging supervisors. Together we all figured out how to combine efforts to make the team vision come true.
LD: How has the Halftime show evolved over the past 19 years?
BR: My first halftime show production design was SBLXI, starring Prince. That creative team was smaller with Prince and myself, LD Bob Dickinson, director Don Mischer, and producers Ricky Kirshner and Glenn Weiss, but the goal was the same for us as our current goal. We wanted to make a visual and musical live show impact on the world, not only to entertain but to inspire. Every aspect of that landed on Prince's shoulders as it did for Kendrick. Production-wise we've always tried improve the way stages are designed and built, looking for ways to make things lighter weight and friendly to the field. Our job isn't just set, stage and show design it's also a process that includes interacting with different TV networks and stadiums every year, as well as our friends at the National Football League and NFL players association to provide a great show and protect the playing surface for the athletes!
LD: When was this documentary made?
BR: We agreed to work with NFL Films early in the process and I'm really happy that they made the behind the scenes documentary about the creation of this halftime show! I wish there was a doc for every halftime show as there's nothing quite like the Super Bowl and all that comes with it.