I served as the Lead Art Director for the 2018 MTV Video Music Awards. We took over the historic Radio City Music Hall and transformed it into a truly VMA world.
Weighing 11k pounds, the large ‘halo’ was specially designed and engineered to be rigged from limited rigging locations at Radio City Music Hall, over the audience seating. The structure had to be strong enough to support itself while being light weight enough to be rigged in the historic venue.
The iconic Moon Man sculpture stood 27’ tall from foot to torch. It was custom designed to mimic the Statue of Liberty to celebrate the show’s return to NYC. The piece had to be completely self supporting, with no rigging from above. Temporary scaffolding was used to construct the statue, then removed for the show. The entire sculpture was lined with mappable LED tape.
The VMA stage was no ordinary stage. We pulled over 1200 seats in the venue to make way for our custom designed stage. The floor was embedded with infrared sensors beneath special black acrylic to facilitate augmented reality in the show.