Kenny Chesney Live at Sphere 2025

Senior Realtime Artist - Sphere 2024-2025

For Kenny Chesney’s 2025 Summer residency at the Sphere, where the canvas is a near 360-degree, 16K-pixel LED marvel, creating truly impactful visual content is an extraordinary challenge. As a Senior Designer on the show, Jordan embraced this complexity, developing parts of the show’s Concept Art, crafting full 3D animation for the song Reality, and creating a real-time scene for the opener, in order to deliver an immersive experience unlike any other. His role extended far beyond traditional design, encompassing every stage from initial ideation to final, high-resolution rendering and live show implementation.

For Kenny Chesney's "Reality," the goal was to create a deeply personal and visually stunning piece of immersive art. Jordan not only developed the concept and style frames, transforming Kenny's extensive collection of tour posters and access badge art into a breathtaking visual journey, but ended up personally animating and delivering the 3.5-minute piece, rendered in an astounding 12K pixels. This highly detailed and expansive piece became one of the most photographed and shared visuals on social media during the show, resonating deeply with fans as a unique celebration of Kenny’s career and journey as an artist.

Working with Kenny’s opener, Brandi Cyrus, presented a different challenge: delivering a visually captivating 45-minute set with a limited budget and timeline. Jordan leveraged Unreal Engine to build a full real-time 3D disco ball scene, a dynamic and responsive environment that allowed for immediate creative flexibility. They developed the entire scene in just three weeks, a stark contrast to the many months typically required for pre-rendered content, and its real-time nature allowed for on-the-fly adjustments and live VJ control, ensuring the visuals constantly evolved and kept the audience engaged. Jordan designed the scene with exposed controls over key elements, including triggerable events, visual cues, and color options, allowing Brandi's team to control everything from a horse breaking through disco tiles to adjusting ambient animation speeds and disco tile configurations, ultimately keeping her opening set fresh and visually compelling for its entire duration.

The sheer scale and unique spherical canvas of the Sphere's media plane presented significant design and visualization hurdles. Jordan pioneered new visualization methods to overcome these challenges and streamline their creative process, including utilizing the Unreal Engine digital twin of the Sphere to rapidly visualize element placements and enable faster decision-making. To empower other designers, Jordan also developed an After Effects template that integrated high-fidelity renders from their digital twin, making complex Sphere-specific views and visualizations accessible to users without Unreal Engine expertise, thereby significantly improving studio-wide collaboration and efficiency as these workflows are now standard practice across the studio.

Credits:

Jordan Ariel
Alex Stamm
Nicolas Randall
Ron Robinson
Liam Ward
Keith Anderson
Simon Anaya
Tharyn Valavanis
Micheal Clement
Serhan Ulkumen Ardila
Nick Maresh
Anna Zanoni
Eric Scott
David Greg
Ned McNeilage
Thomas Choi