Behind the scenes of the Super Bowl Halftime Show
While the Kansas City Chiefs take on the Philadelphia Eagles in the NFL season-finale at the Super Bowl LVII in Glendale, Arizona, there’s the small matter of the musical extravaganza taking place midway through the game, but what is it actually like to work on the showpiece event?
“5… 4… 3… 2… 1… and we’re live,” says Hayley Collett, associate director of one of the most-watched sport entertainment shows on earth. A global audience of around 100 million, performances from the biggest musical icons of our time, and it’s all live… for 15 minutes. Welcome to the Super Bowl Halftime Show.
Rihanna is this year’s star name, performing in her first live event for more than five years, so anticipation is high. However, no matter the star chosen for the annual hallowed slot, the performers are sideshows to the main event; the season finale of the NFL, which this year sees the Kansas City Chiefs take on the Philadelphia Eagles at the State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona on Sunday 12 February.
Nevertheless, those 30 minutes between plays are key, highly anticipated and, above all, meticulously planned.
Collett works with award-winning director, Hamish Hamilton, with whom she’s worked on the event since 2010, and who directed the opening and closing ceremonies for the Olympic and Paralympic Games London 2012 and Tokyo 2020.
Their remit is to showcase unique live spectacles through multi-camera-based television directing and it’s Collett’s role to call the live camera shots. The job is not for the faint-hearted, as Hamilton describes on a YouTube video entitled, Inside the Super Bowl 50 Halftime Show Control Room, which shows Collett in action.
"Hayley is calling a shot number and a camera number while counting all the musical beats for the camera team to follow. The shot descriptions and edit points were selected in advance, while rehearsing, by myself, Coldplay, Bruno (Mars) and Beyonce."
Super Bowl day
From the time the whistle goes at half time and the moment TV cuts to the commercial break, it’s all action for the halftime show crew.
Collett cues those on the field of play to let them know when they are off-air; in return, the Brit is told when the field is clear and the well-drilled stage set-up for the show can begin. The countdown to showtime has begun, and timing is crucial.
“The count I do is based on what time we are due on air,” says Collett. “This is heard by everyone who is involved in the production and back at the TV network. The stage manager will physically cue the band on my count.
“The count is also to the start of a time-code track that pyrotechnics, lighting and screens follow, so the effects are triggered at exactly the correct moment.”
The production team have eight minutes to get the set ready, while the show itself is 12-and-a-half to 13-minutes long. Rihanna has confirmed she'll be making use of every second available to her, and the volunteers, who practise madly for a fortnight prior to the event to construct the stage, need to do the same.
“They lay out what they’re going to do for the staging in a rehearsal space,” says Collett. “They tape it out, they put the set into different pieces, and they practise, and they practise, and they practise. Running the carts backwards and forwards and how everything gets plugged in together.”
The world's biggest jigsaw puzzle, if you will.
Beyonce's Super Bowl spark
The creative team have about six of their own cameras but also work with some games cameras, “but we don’t know until everything is plugged in if our cameras are going to work or not”, says Collett, so quick thinking is paramount.
“In 2013, with Beyonce, we had a steady cam – which is a camera mounted to the person – and it completely sheared off its plate. So, we had to think ahead for the script because every single shot is pre-determined.
“So when camera seven was needed – I can’t believe I remember the camera number – we had to replace it with another shot. I’m calling the script and I would be saying, ‘shot 175, seven next’, but Hamish was looking to see what other shot could be used to make sure it would work.”
Beyonce also featured in another dramatic moment in Super Bowl Halftime Show history. In 2013, the lights went out for 34 minutes mid-game and headlines declared ‘Beyonce sends the Super Bowl dark’.
“It was absolutely nothing to do with us, as in the halftime show,” laughs Collett. “We were on a completely separate generator system from the main arena.
“So, for anyone afterwards who was like, ‘It was your fault because you had too many lights on’, or ‘Beyonce had too many lights’, our production executive was able to go, ‘Actually, we had a completely separate genny supply’.”
Weather also plays its part in the open-air extravaganza, depicted most vividly with Prince’s iconic turn in 2007. Awaking to pouring rain and blowing winds in Miami on the day of show at the Dolphin Stadium, Prince just leaned into the experience, replying to a concerned producer: “Can you make it rain any harder?”
What followed was an iconic performance in which the weather played its part, impressing with a spectacular torrential downpour during Purple Rain.
Moment to moment
During preparation for the live show, many factors have to be considered, including the stadium itself. Some arenas have a roof, others don’t. Bruno Mars performed in temperatures of -20 in New Jersey in 2014, with the team opting to position the stage to one side instead of in the middle of the field, so Mars was partially protected from inclement weather.
Daytime shows, such as at the Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California in 2016, impact lighting, which was muted here compared to the full lighting extravaganza in the dark.
When the show is over, the crew have seven minutes to clear the field of any hint of the musical extravaganza. “It can only take that specific amount of time because of the athletes and their warm-up – it’s imperative that it’s done in that amount of time,” says Collett.
With so much pressure, do the Halftime Show team actually enjoy the day?
“You know what? It’s the best show I ever do,” says Collett, whose resume also includes the Oscars, the VMAs, and Taylor Swift’s, Reputation Stadium Tour. “I love it because everyone is in such a good mood, the team is fantastic, the crew is fantastic and it’s a really, really happy day. It’s a joyous day.
One take for the Super Bowl Halftime Show
“You wake up in the morning excited. You have to get to site very early because of security and the amount of people around – so it’s like eight o’clock in the morning and we’re not on until seven o’clock at night and we can’t do anything until then,” says Collett.
“It’s odd compared to other shows in that you normally do a dress rehearsal and then you do the show, or the dress rehearsal is the night before. But at the Super Bowl, we do our dress rehearsal on the Friday, and we don’t do it again until we plug in and do the show live on the Sunday.
“I’m allowed to go onto the field beforehand and I’m just soaking up the atmosphere.
“What we’ll normally do is have something to eat, watch our rehearsal footage back and just practice it and make notes.
“Then the game starts, and we don’t go in the operations truck yet because the quarters are often quite long, and you’d just be sitting there twiddling your thumbs and getting all nervous.
“We normally go into the truck in the middle of the second quarter, check communications – I check communications with the network and then we just have to wait – it’s horrible, it’s just waiting to see what actually happens with the game.
“Everyone wants the game to be quite even and a bit of a cliff hanger at half-time, so it’ll keep people on for the half-time show and then you do it, and it’s over in a flash.
“There’s a really, really high level of concentration during the show itself but it’s really exhilarating once you’ve finished.
“There’s always something that could go wrong but I love live telly, it’s the best thing,” she says. “Once the moment’s gone, the moment’s gone; it’s done, you can’t change it, you can’t do anything, and you just have to deal with what’s in front of you.”
Living for the moment is something we can all learn from but is particularly resonant with those who have their own sport showpiece occasion coming up in a year and half’s time when the Opening Ceremony of the XXXIII Olympiad kicks off Paris 2024.