Design Process: AMA 2009

This blog is for those who are curious about the design process.

Someone asked me what the design steps were for the CMA 2009 show were, so when we did the AMA 2009 show for Carrie Underwood a couple weeks go, I saved a series of images to a folder to share it.  

And so here it is with very little text and  mostly pictures.

It begins with Carrie's Creative Director (Raj Kapoor) deciding how he wants to present her and her song for this particular performance, then he comes to my design company (Deception Arts) who makes sure his idea realizes it's full potential.

These screens will play on screens which are huge quite often, so detail matters.

This particular design was based on 18 different signs. I picked one random sign to follow the life.

Sign 16:   CD notes:  "16. LAST NAME sign. All caps. But only the L the straight part of the T which

becomes an I and the final E. Which spells out LIE is able to light up."

CD reference image:

Deception Artist hires an illustrator to conceptualize how this would look.  In this case it was alivenotdead's very own Asia Eng.  (A couple of the other signs are left in this snapshot.)

An Adobe Illustrator user converts the sketch into bezier curves that can be used by the 3D artist:

The 3D artist creates a 3D sign from these elements:

The 3D artist provides the texture artist with a "UV map" for texturing:

The texture aritst uses this to make textures:

The 3D artist applies this to the model.

The compositor then takes a render of the object with the lights off and lights on and adds some glow to bring it to life.

It is then incorporated into the entire scene with the other 18 signs and an animator animates the timing of the on and off as well as the placement of the objects.  This is called "compositing."

And then has to be all exported out in a crazy way to pump through 8 different screens which all make it into one large one.

And the final result is here......

that's right, it' not there, it's on the left side wall, you can see it in the lower left corner here.  (It also appears on another screen which only the live show audience saw):

And there you have it - the simplified life of one of 18 screens for one show.  Here was the live broadcast (The final wall is made up from 9 different streams of video):

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DfrMRddzpg