When the screen wraps around 18,000 people and spans 160,000 square feet of LED, the familiar rules of visual storytelling no longer apply. Michał Dwojak-Hara knows this firsthand.
As Creative Director and Managing Director of Juice. in Tokyo, he was part of the extended creative and production team behind the visuals for the Backstreet Boys’ Into the Millennium residency and Anyma’s The End of Genesys at the Sphere in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Dwojak-Hara began his career in Germany with agencies including BNEW and Sehsucht, working with clients such as Opel and BMW, before moving to Tokyo in 2007. He has since collaborated with agencies and brands including Dentsu, Hakuhodo, Ajinomoto, and Sony. He also served as VFX executive producer supervising special effects on Hirokazu Koreeda’s Monster.
At ADFEST this year, he co-led a workshop called “Built for the Big Screen” on immersive large-format storytelling alongside Fabian Tan of Dandelion Studios. We spoke with him about what working at that scale demands of a creative team, why bigger spaces require simpler ideas, and what storytellers need to rethink before they can operate in that environment.
At your ADFEST workshop, you described how creative storytelling has historically been built around rectangular frames. How did working at the scale of the Sphere challenge those conversions?
I mean… the simplest way to put it is that the frame just disappears, and with it a lot of the tools we’re used to.
Because in film, even if something isn’t working, you can always kind of… hide it. You reframe, you cut, you decide what people see and what they don’t. And here you don’t really have that. There is no outside. Everything exists at once, around you, behind you.
So suddenly you’re not composing shots anymore, you’re dealing with a situation where the audience is inside the image, and you have to somehow guide them through it. And honestly, at the beginning it feels a bit like you’re losing control. Because all those instincts you’ve built around framing, editing, pacing, they don’t translate directly. You have to rebuild them in a different way.
You noted that larger screens often require simpler ideas. How do you approach that conversation with clients or creative teams who instinctively want to add more to fill the space?
Yeah, that’s always the first reaction, “We have more space, so let’s put more in it.” And I get it, it’s very intuitive. But in practice it just doesn’t work like that. What usually happens is that the idea starts collapsing under its own weight. You add more elements, more layers, more moments, and instead of it feeling bigger, it actually becomes harder to read.
In film, even if something isn’t working, you can always kind of… hide it. You reframe, you cut, you decide what people see and what they don’t. And here you don’t really have that.
So we try not to frame it as “let’s simplify,” because nobody likes that. It’s more about showing that if you don’t protect the core idea, it just disappears at that scale. And honestly, the fastest way is to show it. You do a version with everything, and one that’s more focused, and people immediately see the difference. It’s less about convincing and more about letting the medium push back.
The idea of “designing attention, not frames” came up as a core principle. What does that look like in practice when developing a project?
It basically means we stop thinking in shots and start thinking in flow. Because instead of asking “what does this shot look like,” we ask:
- Where will the audience look first?
- What pulls their attention next?
- How does that attention move over time?
We design that movement using:
- motion direction
- light and contrast
- timing and rhythm
- changes in scale
So the work becomes less about composing a perfect image, and more about creating a clear path for the viewer’s perception. You end up thinking a bit more like… rhythm, I guess. Like building sequences of focus, release, focus again. It’s less visual design, more like managing attention over time.
You described the Sphere as an extreme QC environment. What were the most demanding aspects of working at that scale, particularly given the limitations of previewing work at full scale, and how did those constraints shape your process?
The most demanding part is that you don’t fully see what you’re doing until very late in the process.
You’re working on something that’s impossible to properly preview at your desk, so a lot of the time you’re making decisions without really knowing how it will feel in the final space.
You have this strange combination of uncertainty and zero tolerance for mistakes. And that changes how you work.
At the same time, when it finally shows up there, everything is exposed. Details, scale issues, timing, things that would be completely fine in other formats suddenly become very visible.
So you have this strange combination of uncertainty and zero tolerance for mistakes. And that changes how you work. You spend more time upfront, you test ideas earlier, you rely less on “we’ll fix it later,” because later is basically when it’s already on the screen.
It forces a bit more discipline, I would say.
Are there any projects or moments at the Sphere that you feel demonstrate the medium particularly well? What stands out about how they were executed?
Yeah, for me one of the more interesting moments was actually from the Backstreet Boys show, the sequence with the couple dancing, built around Show Me The Meaning Of Being Lonely. Because it goes a bit against the obvious instinct. It’s not trying to be big in a very literal way. It’s quite restrained, focused on two figures, on movement, on that interaction between them. And I think that’s why it works. You’re not overwhelmed with information, you can actually follow what’s happening. There’s something in it that feels quite physical, almost like you’re watching a performance, not just animation. You can see that it’s coming from choreography, from something very human, not just from a visual idea.
And then the interesting part is what the space does to it. Because even though the idea itself is quite intimate, the scale of the Sphere amplifies it. It stops being just a scene and becomes something you’re kind of inside of. From our side, when you work on things like this, it becomes very tied to music. Timing is everything. When the movement expands, when it holds, when it releases, it all sits on top of the track. And that’s what makes it feel coherent, not random.
So again, it’s not about complexity, one idea, properly timed, properly scaled, and allowed to play out.
Backstreet Boys “Show Me The Meaning Of Being Lonely”
Backstreet Boys “Get Another Boyfriend”
Backstreet Boys “Siberia”
Where do you see large-format immersive storytelling heading over the next few years?
It feels like things are going in two opposite directions at once. On one side everything becomes smaller, more personal, more driven by AI, consumed on phones. And on the other side you have these experiences that are very physical, very hard to replicate. And I think that’s exactly why they will grow. Because they offer something you can’t compress or scroll past.
Also, from a more practical point of view, more venues like this are already being planned, so it’s not going to stay a one-off experiment. So at some point it just becomes another format you need to understand, like cinema or broadcast.
You closed with the idea that a brief for immersive media should describe a human experience rather than a film. What should creatives or producers focus on when approaching that shift for the first time?
I think the easiest way to get into it, especially the first time, is to not overthink the format straight away, and just… reduce it to a few very basic questions. Like, first of all, what should people actually feel when they’re in there. Not in a big, abstract way, just very simply. Is it awe, is it tension, is it something calmer. Because that kind of sets the tone for everything else.
Unlike film, you don’t really have that phase later where you can just fix things in edit. Once you start building it at that scale, with those render times and all the technical constraints, it gets heavy very quickly.
Then, quite quickly, it becomes about attention. Where do they look first, what pulls them, how that shifts over time. And you usually see quite fast if that part is not clear, because then the whole thing starts to feel a bit random, like things are happening but you’re not really guiding anyone through it. And the third thing is the space itself. Not just visuals on a screen, but whether the environment is actually changing around you in a way that you can feel.
That’s usually the moment where it stops being “content” and starts being something immersive. And then, I think this is where it gets very practical, especially in preproduction, you kind of have to sanity-check all of this quite early.
Because, unlike film, you don’t really have that phase later where you can just fix things in edit. Once you start building it at that scale, with those render times and all the technical constraints, it gets heavy very quickly. So even at the beginning, it helps to ask quite simple questions. Does this idea actually hold attention for that long, does it have a clear progression, does it really use the space, or could it just exist as a normal film?
And also just having the right people involved early makes things easier, not harder. You catch things when they’re still easy to change, instead of solving them when everything is already in motion. So naturally the brief shifts a bit. It’s less about describing scenes one by one, and more about describing what kind of experience you’re building. The emotional arc, how attention moves, how the space evolves. And once that part is clear, the rest is actually much more straightforward.
