Globe 365

Event Design & Production
Experience Design
Video Production

The Boston Globe

Globe 365

Solution

Create an animated mosaic to be projected upon the dome, traveling day-by-day through the intricate history captured by the Boston Globe.

Insight

The dome-shaped enclosure for the activation offered a unique canvas upon which to paint the story of the Globe through the years.

Challenge

Tell the story of the Boston Globe in a way that would resonate with festival goers at Hubweek, Boston’s week-long celebration of art, science, and technology.

My Role

An experiential event project centered around local history couldn’t have been better suited to me. The Boston Globe had a domed tent and projector setup ready to go for HUBWeek, but needed us to come up with the content. We developed the idea of a mesmeric collage which would, over the course of an hour or so, cycle through the entire calendar year from January 1st to December 31st and on each day would highlight headlines on the day from the Globe’s long history. When it came time to produce the video for this mammoth motion graphics undertaking, I developed a custom piece of software to animate all the content we’d collected, map it to the dome-shaped video format, and record it all for us to save untold hours of tedious manual sequencing an animation.

Reception

Upon entering the exhibit dome, viewers were taken on a mesmeric journey through over a century of historic moments as reported by the Boston Globe. The surreal experience brought history and journalism to life while captivating viewers in the process.

Development

Working with the Boston Globe’s official historian, we gathered thousands of assets to capture stories from the headlines throughout history to mark each day of the year. The experience leveraged design, animation and video production, projection mapping, and was programmed for automation—even writing custom software to sequence and animate the photography and headlines, so numerous were the assets.

Background

All of the installations at Hubweek were to be housed within dome-shaped structures. While these domes provided an intimate setting for crowds, they also offered the perfect opportunity to create a unique canvas on which to paint the Boston Globe’s story for a captive audience.