The biggest talking point of this past weekend’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Annual Festival was the Hologram of the late great Tupac, which brought the rapper back to life during Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg‘s headline performance. Now the creator of the amazing murial, Nick Smith of AV Concepts, has revealed some details about how it came about. MTV interviewed Smith who said it was super-producer Dr.Dre’s idea to resurect the California rapper, it took nearly four months to create and cost betwen £100k-£400k.

“We worked with Dr. Dre on this and it was Dre’s vision to bring this back to life,” said Nick Smith, president of AV Concepts, the San Diego company that created the hologram. It was his idea from the very beginning and we worked with him and his camp to utilize the technology to make it come to life. You can take their likenesses and voice and … take people that haven’t done concerts before or perform music they haven’t sung and digitally recreate it.

The Tupac hologram was several months in the planning and took nearly four months to create in a studio and though Smith was not able to reveal the exact price tag for the illusion, he said a comparable one could cost anywhere from $100,000 to more than $400,000 to pull off. “I can’t say how much that event cost, but I can say it’s affordable in the sense that if we had to bring entertainers around the world and create concerts across the country, we could put [artists] in every venue in the country,”

TMZ also revealed that Tupac’s mother, Afeni Shakur, gave Dre the permission to use her baby boy in the perfomance, in which he made a donation to the Tupac Amaru Shakur Foundation in return.