POWER at the Illuminarium Toronto

[The Event]
The Illuminarium is a franchise Entertainment Venue that specializes in providing an immersive projection focused experience with interactive capabilities with highly engineered projection equipment that is integrated into the very venue itself.
I had the pleasure of creating content for the Illuminarium Toronto location for a partnership collaboration with MakeRoom Inc & LOVEU4EVER Events for their NYE Event.
The initial opportunity was a competition where artists across the Toronto area could submit their video artworks for a chance to showcase and contribute their artwork to the event. Only 10 artist slots could be claimed and I was fortunate enough to take one of those winning spots.

I was then given a rough period of 3-4 weeks to prepare my content for the event being held at establishment while also attending multiple on-site visits to stress test our content.
Upon finding out more about what the venue's equipment could do, I then decided to take my winning submissions and cut them up into something much more ambitious with the time allocated to me by creating a whole new working project using elements from my initial submission and building more on top to reach the visual direction that I had set out to do.

The theme for the overall event was "Scale" & "Aethereal", so with the handy use of creature sculpts that I had done on the side over the last few years I wanted to push the theme of alien mechanical creatures floating in the cosmos. Without the restraint of having to rig and animate my creatures within that 3-4 weeks from the decision to have them drifting/floating in space, I then had a pretty looking project in my hands that I felt would've been perfect for the event while also being within scope.

I want to thank MakeRoom & LOVEU4EVER for the amazing opportunity and also the fantastic staff/crew at Illuminarium Toronto for the support on helping all 10 of us artists with preparing our art pieces from a technical stand-point.

This has been my largest physical canvas to date in my career and it was an amazing opportunity to be standing in the room witnessing a sold-out new year's party viewing and taking photos/videos of something I built on my laptop in my room.

[Process]
All the visuals in this project were built animated within UE5. I leaned heavily into shortcuts to make my deadline so things such as UV'ing and Retopology for all the creatures was a hard "No", so I leaned heavily on World Aligned Mapping which actually brought some fitting artifact details that added to the motion of how these creatures were twirling and moving through the environment.
This taught me a nice lesson to never-say-never to certain practices that we would otherwise avoid in games development because the things we actively avoid can often create some positive effects for other projects and situations.
In addition to that, I also discovered from this project just how convenient it is to just live screen capture UE5 directly from the editor viewport while playing directly from the sequencers and then taking that footage into Adobe Premiere to make final touches before re-rendering the final edits off. The footage held up incredibly well on the big screen but that being said, it was a conscious consideration that projectors are very forgiving with footage that isn't perfectly at 4K.

I hope that you like what I was able to produce for this event! Happy New Year to everyone! I'm so amped for 2026 :)