Content designed for an unprecedented architectural display.
Case Studies / 01 · Sphere Entertainment
Building a New Medium
From possibility to practice.
When I joined Sphere in August 2023, the Exosphere had been displaying permanent public content for only about a month. The team had already spent more than a year pioneering the medium, yet its creative language, workflows, and best practices were still evolving in real time.
Executive impact at a glance
Why this work mattered.
Helped turn a newly launched architectural canvas into a more repeatable creative practice by improving validation, mapping, collaboration, and production confidence.
RoleLead ExoSphere Content Creator
Production and preview innovations developed for real-world structures.
Moon, Artemis, NHL Draft, Sun, and seasonal experiences.
Tools and practices designed to outlast a single delivery.
01
Finding the real problem
The medium had launched.
The practice was still being invented.
The team had already proven that compelling content could live on the world's largest LED canvas. The next challenge was making that success more repeatable: learning what translated from preview to reality, shortening feedback loops, removing recurring friction, and raising consistency as the work became more ambitious.
I brought more than two decades of experience from visual effects, animation, immersive design, and emerging technology. My role was not to claim the beginning of the story. It was to help accelerate the next chapter.
From launch to daily practice
Every project became
both a delivery and a lesson.
Public launch
The Exosphere entered the world with an ambitious rotation of content and a team that had already spent more than a year preparing for the moment.
Live learning
Once the work was visible at architectural scale, every delivery exposed new lessons about readability, motion, brightness, review, and audience behavior.
Daily practice
The opportunity was to turn those discoveries into stronger habits, faster iteration, clearer decisions, and a steadily higher quality bar.
Helping a new medium mature
The work was broader than any one tool.
I contributed insights and optimizations across the creative process: observing where momentum slowed, proposing practical changes, strengthening reviews, improving communication, and building lightweight systems only when they unlocked meaningful leverage.
Observe
Study where intent, preview, review, and the physical result diverged.
Optimize
Refine workflows, review practices, communication, planning, and creative standards.
Build when needed
Create focused production systems when process changes alone could not remove the friction.
Share
Turn discoveries into repeatable practices that helped the wider team move with more confidence.
Enabling the team
Focused systems that created more room for creative judgment.
ExosPreviewer and ExosMapper were not the whole contribution. They were two focused responses to recurring friction—moving validation earlier, reducing repetitive setup, and giving the wider team more time to make consequential creative decisions.
Preview
ExosPreviewer
Earlier validation of scale, framing, camera behavior, and multiple synchronized views.
Mapping
ExosMapper
Less repetitive setup, more flexible control, and more time for compositional decisions.
A collective medium
No one owned the result. Everyone owned the learning.
Creative direction, artists, production, engineering, operations, clients, and review all shaped the final experience.
Quality improved when those groups could see the same problem earlier, remove roadblocks together, and learn from the same result.
Redefining an icon
The Moon,
reimagined.
The Exosphere launched with a Moon. My assignment was to make it unforgettable.
From scientific observation to emotional experience
The goal was not simply a more accurate Moon. It was a Moon people believed.
Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter imagery provided a scientific foundation. That data was translated into a CG surface, then shaped through lighting, contrast, motion, and readability decisions specific to the scale and behavior of the Exosphere.
The finished piece replaced the earlier Moon in rotation, became a new flagship experience, and grew into a partnership with NASA around the Moon and future space-related opportunities.
01
Scientific foundation
LROC imageryHigh-resolution lunar observations established the geological source and surface character.
02
Digital reconstruction
Surface + displacementThe source data became a controllable CG Moon with dimensional surface detail.
03
Creative interpretation
Lighting + scale + readabilityLighting, contrast, composition, and motion were tuned for believability at architectural scale.
04
The flagship Moon
Exosphere experienceThe finished piece turned scientific source material into a cinematic public experience.
Defining iconic moments
A growing body of work helped reveal what the medium could become.
Artemis IINASA collaboration bringing the Moon, Orion, and mission flight path to the Exosphere
Leaded LightA visual language designed for the architecture
NHL Draft 2024A live global sports moment
The SunLong-form celestial exploration
Eye RollerTransforming the building into a character
What I carried forward
Creative quality rises when every discipline can see the same problem and learn from the same result.
The work reinforced a pattern I return to often: shorten the distance between disciplines, build shared ways to evaluate the work, and leave the team with systems that make better decisions easier.