Behind Tyler, the Creator and Doja Cat’s Dazzling Coachella Setpieces: Silent House Designers Explain the Headliners’ Aerial Stunts, Dinosaurs and Mud (EXCLUSIVE)

For an artist trying to break Coachella, it pays to enlist buddies at a cutting-edge manufacturing agency. At this 12 months’s competition, L.A.-based Silent House has laid declare to designing and executing the frilly productions for 3 of the 4 headliners. While its ideas for No Doubt skewed to a conventional rock-band setup, the studio went wild — and totally cinematic — with the stunts and setpieces for Doja Cat’s and Tyler, the Creator’s extravagant exhibits.

“Just in the cyclical way of things, we’ll be wherever our clients are, but to have this many of us (from the company) with this many headliners on one festival is quite extraordinary,” says Silent House Studios president Alex Reardon. (Of this 12 months’s 4 headliners, solely Lana Del Rey labored with a non-Silent House staff). That two of them have been rappers whose concepts have a tendency towards the avant-garde allowed for barrier-busting: “Neither Tyler nor Doja Cat have ever come at any of the shows that we’ve been involved with them on from a point of cliché.”

On Monday, after the primary go-round of Coachella 2024 (and forward of a second weekend coming April 19-21), Silent House’s designers unpacked simply what went into Doja’s and Tyler’s most feature-film-worthy scenes, as seen by livestream viewers in addition to audiences on-site within the desert.

TYLER, THE CREATOR

Besides being the president of the studio division of Silent House, Reardon has personally labored as Tyler, the Creator’s artistic director and designer for the rapper’s final three album cycles. “I’ve done the BET Awards and Grammys with him, and developed a great relationship with not just an extraordinary musician and talented creator,” he says, “but actually one of the nicest, most generous, kind, funny people you could ever hope to work with.” And additionally anyone who determined, not less than for the needs of Coachella, that his misplaced calling was to be a stuntman.

Tyler’s stage design had the rapper wearing a ranger uniform, sitting in a trailer in a Monument Valley-style desert. Just your common hip-hop state of affairs, proper? A filmed section portraying Tyler contained in the automobile led to an expectant highlight focusing viewers’ consideration on one thing about to occur with the automobile — after which “Tyler actually was launched through the wall of the trailer, out about 80 feet, and landed on the thrust on a wire on an apex,” explains Reardon. The simulated explosion required the mixed skills of pyro specialists and film stunt choreographers.

“The fly guys said if you have him in the air too long, it loses impact and gets a bit Peter Pan-ish,” notes Reardon, so that they had him rapidly land on the ramp, to keep away from an elongated floating impact… however not so rapidly that viewers would miss the entire thing.

The stunt coordinator was Pat Romano, “a very, very, very experienced and safe pair of hands to pass this off to, and a great guy as well… I was able to sculpt a moment that Tyler had wanted to do by bringing the pyro team into the conversation with the stunt team. I told them the pyro guys, ‘You have to create an explosion that creates a believable effect as to how a six-foot human being is being projected this far. So it has to be a fireball, and it has to be bits of balsa wood coming out on air mortars.’ I said, ‘Think about this as a film, not a live concert. Think about that one shot.’ And then in rehearsals, we’ve actually worked out exactly how far down the thrust the cameras had to be in line. And then we coordinated with the very cooperative people at Coachella to make sure the live stream and our IMAG on different cameras appeared to be in exactly that same place. And I think we absolutely nailed it. You couldn’t watch that without smiling.”

Reardon additionally needed an enormous end to bookend the rapper’s set. His staff concocted an concept the place Tyler would walk vertically up a cliff wall, hold on to a ledge for expensive life, then be blown throughout (and off) the stage by a simulated wind gust. Again, this concerned some basic wire work and a really prepared participant, with a bit extra pyro to complete his journey from one facet of the stage to the opposite with a bang. “Tyler certainly put the work in, because it’s not an easy thing to do at all, especially the vertical wall walk.”

(Coachella’s livestream cameras really missed capturing everything of his exit, which was higher seen in fan footage, however hopefully that can be rectified with the feed for weekend 2.)

How did the concept for doing these semi-comedic stunts come about? From an unlikelier inspiration than you may think. “In preliminary discussions,” Reardon says, “Tyler was referring to old 1920s black-and-white movie sketches of people clinging on to clock faces,” Reardon says, a la the feats of stunt-happy silent-movie geniuses like Harold Lloyd and Bister Keaton, and that “was really where the stunt ideas came from.” As for the milieu, “I think it came from him just being in the desert and saying ‘We should do a desert thing’… It was all very amorphous at the beginning, and then as we went down various different paths of what it could be, we ended up with sort of sandstone striations, which served very well for what we have to give him, which is in essence a playground to work within to create the show.”

Tyler’s set was hardly characterised solely by the motion moments that bookended it. Indeed, he introduced it the vitality stage down about as a lot as is feasible, even to a mirthful excessive. Following via on the concept that he’s tenting alone within the desert, one of many rapper’s quirkier notions was to munch on a snack throughout a quiet second.

“He said to me, ‘I think I want to be up there eating something, and I said, ‘Well, if you’d gone camping, what would you want?’ He said, ‘Oh, I’d want a PB&J.’ And then he was surprised that he was actually getting a PB&J, but I said, ‘You asked for it, you got it.’ There was a quite interesting scene backstage before the show where one of the production assistant was very carefully making sure that there was the right amount of peanut butter and right amount of jelly. We get very scientific! I never would’ve thought someone could spend so much time and attention making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. But it’s in the detail, as I say.”

DOJA CAT

No PB&Js or relaxed desert idylls for Doja Cat. For her manufacturing design, “we were creating, essentially, an abandoned quarantine lab onstage,” says Parker Genoway, who’s Doja’s artistic producer and manufacturing/lighting designer at Silent House. (He works intently in collaboration with Doja’s artistic director, Brett Alan Nelson, and choreographer, Parris Goebel.)

There was no storyline or narrative to her set, so it’s not as if the deserted lab motif was an concept the viewers was essentially meant to choose up on. Still, it would assist clarify why she made her entrance on the high of the present in a Hazmat swimsuit. Even after the star shed that exact pores and skin, “We brought that in so that even our whole stage crew., as you saw, was wearing Hazmat suits as well, so everyone was an extension of the show.”

Stripped of that cumbersome gear, Doja Cat had a variety of eye-popping costume adjustments, together with a platinum-blonde-meets-Bigfoot look that concerned an entire troupe of dancing Yetis; a white, furry bikini of types; a broad-shouldered yellow leotard; and corsets that alternately regarded like they have been product of plexiglass or gentle, bony materials. But what viewers might bear in mind most is a sequence of massive, brash set-pieces.

One sequence had a 40-foot-long dinosaur skeleton trailing her down the thrust stage that prolonged in an L-shape via the viewers. The New Substance-crafted dino “took eight people to operate,” says Genoway, noting the dino was dealt with by “a combination of stage techs who held the weight of it and dancers who articulated some of the movement.” The dino did should get again to the stage sooner or later, so, given the narrowness of the ramp, “you can imagine the rehearsal that goes into a dinosaur making a three-point turn.”

Then there was the gleaming satellite tv for pc stage set 250 toes into the gang, the place a spotless Doja started the present in that Hazmat swimsuit. She returned to that very same spot on the finish, the place there was now a full mud pit awaiting her and her dancers. “It needed to be thick enough, not watery, with enough body to it so clumps of it could be on her shoulder,” says Genoway. “It was a lot of trial. We had to audition mud.” (Ultimately, they ended up going with a system near what was used within the golden age of mud wrestling exhibitions.) Here was the precise inverse of Woodstock ’94, as festivals go, in a approach: At Coachella, the mud stays strictly onstage.

Genoway was additionally happy with a second in Doja’s set the place she seems to swig from a bottle of whisky, then throws it down… igniting a hearth wall that extends 200 toes extensive. With the pyro as foreground, it’s at that second {that a} platform she’s standing on begins rising 30 toes above the stage flooring. (She was visibly tethered to the platform, so some viewers might need anticipated one other flying impact, a la Tyler… however no, that’s simply to forestall Doja changing into a large stain on the Coachella stage.)

“Anytime we ask our artists to do something that might be a little bit uncomfortable, we want to also have done it ourselves,” Genoway notes. “With those floating platforms, I was definitely sure to go up and test those and make sure it was something that I felt comfortable with before sending her up there above a big, 200-foot long line of fire, 30 feet above the stage floor plus another seven feet from the stage to the audience.” (But, he provides, “She is so down to do anything, and oftentimes she’s the one asking to do these crazy things, so it’s just fun to be able to support her in that. She’s not safe and neither is Tyler. We love working for these artists that are gonna push the limits and not be like ‘I’m comfortable here, I’m gonna stay here.’”)

Desert winds play an enormous think about what Silent House can design… and what backup plans they should have in place if an actual storm kicks up.

“Originally when we designed those platforms, they came back with a wind rating of 5 miles-per-hour of sustained wind,” Genoway says. “And we said, ‘Absolutely not, not worth doing.’ It will always be 5 mph sustained wind at Coachella. So we re-engineered them and refigured out the spacing so that they had enough sway in play to be able to execute at a higher wind speed. If we hit 15 miles-per-hour of sustained wind, we were gonna have to go to our backup plan, and continue to use them but not with performers on them. I was just looking at the weather app over and over, but the wind ended up playing nicely and we got to do what we wanted to do.”

With the dinosaur, “anything that’s crowd-adjacent is engineered to the highest level of safety. So, the dinosaur was wind-rated up to 40 miles an hour of sustained wind — which is actually after the point that the festival would’ve closed down anyway, so there were no scenarios in which that was gonna have to be killed. … I think that was special, in that I personally haven’t seen anything like that out in the audience of this scale before this festival. It was pretty beastly to operate, but made for a pretty exciting moment.”

The Silent House staff is getting ready to do all of it once more on weekend 2, with some tweaks to verify every part will get caught completely by the competition cameras.

Says Reardon, “I think the people on livestream see more detail, but the people in person get more vibe. I think it’s one of actually our core tenants at Silent House, to make sure we’re designing for both. Because more often than not, anything we design is gonna be broadcast; at some point, someone’s gonna come and shoot the show. So from the earliest inception of any show, we’re always thinking about how do we make sure that both of those two things are hit equally, to make sure that everyone’s experience is as good as everyone else’s.”

Usually, Silent House would drop out of the equation and hand issues over after the opening evening of a tour, so Coachella’s two weekends mark the uncommon occasion through which they’ve to remain on and never take a breather after evening 1. “The adrenaline simply carries you and carries you, after which when it’s over, you’re simply out.

“But it is just insanely rewarding,” Reardon provides. “I’ve been doing this for 35-plus years, “and when the house lights go out and tens of thousands of people start screaming, that is what I refer to as the sound of our office. It’s a beautiful sound, and it’s just that wonderful human experience of being out there in a live space doing good work for good people.”