ABC Disney Times Square Studios
Part ABC Studio / Part Disney Billboard / First-Ever Media Façade
Times Square Studios was Disney’s reaction to NBC’s location of the Today Show, to Rockefeller Center.
The goal was to create a “looking glass” - both a bold addition to Times Square, but through it, also a view for the world from Times Square. The result was the iconic ABC SuperSign.
Media as Architecture
Collaborating with Eddie Soto - Senior Vice President of Concept Design at Walt Disney Imagineering, I provided 3D design and visualization of the building’s facade and proposed 9 ribbon LED banners, with each ribbon approximately 133-feet long, totaling 3,100 sf, wrapping the corner site and defining the form of the building, not with traditional flat panels (that are defined by the building), but with dynamic, undulating strips derived from the idea of the digital news ticker.
Beginning with extensive context photography, my team produced a fully textured model of the Times Square area in order to cover views of, and from the site, from every conceivable angle. We produced iterative 3D designs for a wide range of ribbon display design schemes and precisely tested various cutting-edge LED technologies (including resolution, number of colors and viewing angles) in order to accurately depict differences between them in terms of: image quality, sight lines, content legibility and potential dead spots. We also tested for visual content mapped to independently curving ribbons – both to sell the radical concept and to ultimately ensure proper streaming onto the separate ribbons, in an easy-to-view format.
Nothing about the ABC TV Studio media facade was conventional – it was unique with one of the tightest radius ever built, (a 3.5 foot curved sign face), its curvilinear sign face was exceptionally challenging in getting matching LED modules to seamlessly fit on the steel frame – requiring significant, accurate construction previzualization, depicting not simply the design intent, but the design actuality.
Prior to construction, we provided design previz of the Good Morning America studio interior as well, creating views from virtual studio cameras (using actual broadcast camera lens parameters) in the digital studio, out through the 2nd floor windows to the views of Times Square immediately outside, in order to assess the relative value of controlling the myriad of adjacent Times Square signage opportunities that would appear in the background of the GMA broadcast (we're talking tens of millions of dollars, and the opportunities for competitors to advertise on their show).
