NBCUNIVERSAL: UPFRONT

This past April, NBCUniversal returned to Leroy + Clarkson to have us craft their 2015 upfront – a massive, 3000 attendee red carpet event held yearly at the Javits Center in NYC. They were keeping the “All Together. Different.” tagline we had developed the previous year, but the new message was about two things: “immersion” and “data”.

We satisfied the immersion request by creating a 30-foot tall, 200-foot wide, 270-degree wrap-around projection image that filled 13 screens and enveloped the audience with gigantic mondo-footage of A-list talent from their top tier networks.

We represented data with a lot of very cool, very abstract patterns that morphed in and out of one another, creating living breathing graphic backplates that unified the 70+ celebs.

We ended up creating a big show opener, a music video closer, a comprehensive show package for the entire event, and a few other ancillary pieces of content that supported various speakers. The aspect ratio was so absurdly wide, it’s hard to do it justice with a single fixed camera, but if you’re curious, you can at least see the show opener we shot during rehearsal in the video below.

It was a very intense 6 weeks of around-the-clock production, but L+C was firing on all cylinders, and it all came together swimmingly. The 30+ production team is too lengthy to list here, but you know who you are. Big ups to Rachel Yoo and Marcelo Cardoso, who were my left and right arm for the duration. Chris Harmon, lead animator. Jon Smith, our masterful technical director who can actually figure out how to make a 13-screen 26-projector video presentation come together without a pixel out of place. Editors Corey Weisz and Dana Bol. And Abbe Daniels, Hillary Downes, Gina Haldeen, & Kate Hillis, who kept the entire project on time and on budget. Thanks to all for another fantastic job well done.