Fight On, Wall to Wall: our work lights up USC Football’s new home

The story

Why it matters: These are permanent, public screens in USC Football’s new headquarters. The lobby is designed to welcome the Trojan Family every day, so this work is seen by fans, recruits and visitors, not just a festival audience.

What we made:

• The Immersive Room’s curved LED wall: a 54-second CG opener directed by Jordan Halsey. A sword strikes the field, grass erupts and Tommy Trojan burns into existence, every cut set to “Trojans,” an original score by Jasper Patterson. A live-action cinematic short directed by Akaash Tumuluri, shot by Harnish Ambaliya and produced by Nathan Fairchild played on the wall too.
• The lobby’s vertical screen: student projects directed by Michael Patterson, Professor of Cinematic Practice in the John C. Hench Division of Animation and Digital Arts, made by Florian Huang, Daniel Ma, Minseo Kim, Ling Li, Ruoyu Dai, Logan De Mesa and Hanqian Bao.
• The system: Qinchuan Zhang, Lead Developer.

How it works:

• The opener was built in Houdini and Solaris, shaded in MaterialX and rendered in Karma, timed to the score in TouchDesigner and finished in Nuke.
• The wall master is 8000 × 2454 pixels, a canvas more than three times wider than it is tall, so every frame was composed for the room.
• On opening day a PIXERA media server and two studio workstations drove both the wall and the tall lobby screen.

What’s next: The full-resolution Samsung The Wall (10560 × 3240) is being installed. New work made at the wall’s own resolution will follow.

Go deeper: The USC Football films and breakdown · Patterson Reckinger · USC Athletics on the opening