Not every design job sits inside a single theatre. The Land of Legends in Belek, Antalya, is a whole resort — an integrated theme-and-water park developed by a joint venture of Rixos, Emaar Properties and Dragone Productions. It opened in the summer of 2016 and was named Europe's Best Theme Park in 2017 and 2018.
What's different about a Dragone-driven park is that the shows are the architecture. The park is anchored by live installations — a 12-metre "Dragone Gate," a nightly Musical Boat Parade that turns the waterways into a stage. Designing at that scale, you stop thinking like a set designer and start planning where the spectacle happens — where the crowd gathers, where the show rises, how a guest moves from one moment to the next across the whole site.
Working with Dragone on jobs like this is where I learned to think about permanent, large-format spectacle — the same instincts that show up later in my resort and ceremony work. Production design isn't always a proscenium and a curtain. Sometimes the stage is a kilometre wide and open to the sky.