Sphere
Postcard From Earth
Collaborating closely with Sphere Studios since summer 2021, m ss ng p eces and executive creative director Mike Woods have been at the heart of Sphere's groundbreaking launch film experience, Darren Aronofsky's Postcard from Earth.
In the summer of 2021, m ss ng p eces were invited to a building site in Las Vegas, Nevada, and shown plans for the future of immersive entertainment.
Acting as ideation consultants, our team was tasked with helping creators understand how to bring unprecedented ideas to life. Our challenge was to leverage find and establish processes that would allow the world’s best storytellers to get the very best out of what Sphere could offer - not just as filmmakers, or music artists, but as experience designers themselves.
Sphere is the largest spherical building in the world, containing the largest purpose-built screens in the world. The exterior Exosphere comes in at 580,000 sq ft, and the 16k resolution (!) internal screen measures 160,000 sq ft. Added to this is the world’s best sound system, in Holoplot, a 3D beam-forming auditory marvel that can pinpoint individual parts of the audience with bewildering accuracy, across 1,600 permanently installed speakers, that include over 167,000 individual amplifiers.
But future-proofing modern immersive entertainment demands even more, and Sphere also enables us to use wind, smell, heat, smoke and other synced foreground objects.
NEVADA, USA – JULY 9: The Sphere is seen at the Venetian Resort in Las Vegas, Nevada, United States on July 9, 2023. The Sphere is a spherical music and entertainment arena in Paradise, Nevada, near the Las Vegas Strip and east of the Venetian resort. The project was announced by the Madison Square Garden Company in 2018, and construction was underway the following year. (Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Implementing a completely new creative process for immersive effects while the venue and technology was still under construction required the full spectrum of our team's experience across experience design, production and post.
Acting as 4D/immersive effects supervisor, Mike Woods worked with Darren and his team to push Sphere to its executional limits, leading ideation and implementation of scent, wind and atmospherics, temperature, lighting and their integration alongside haptics and sound.
Postcard From Earth is an innovative exploration of planet Earth through the eyes of two human beings. A sci-fi journey deep in our future as these descendants reflect on our shared home.
It demanded the use of the trailblazing technology in truly authentic and additive ways, as we harnessed these groundbreaking tools in balance with world best storytelling. It's this delicate balance that propels Mike and his team in their work.
