The project of mine that carries an Emmy isn't a stadium or a theme park. It's a television event.
NBC News' Education Nation was an annual broadcast summit at Rockefeller Center — a working outdoor studio built in the middle of Manhattan. My scenic work on it won an Emmy, at the 2012 News & Documentary Awards, for the 2011 broadcast.
A studio in a public plaza
We turned the Rockefeller plaza — Prometheus statue and all — into a live broadcast environment, with projection mapping and a real-time "digital fountain" that pulled in viewers' messages. Designing in a space like that means solving everything at once: daylight and night, weather, crowds, multiple cameras, and the strict visual language of network news.
Make it disappear
A news set works when nobody notices it. Every surface has to read cleanly on camera, hide its own lighting and cable, and hold up shot after shot across days of live coverage. There's no blackout to cover a transition — just continuous airtime where everything is on display.
Where I learned to design
Broadcast is the most unforgiving school I know. It taught me that the highest compliment is for the audience to never see the set at all — an instinct I've carried into everything since, even the work that's meant to be seen.
