Gabriel Iglesias’s Netflix Comedy Special Stage

Smash Design recently had the privilege to take on a massive scenic construction project for Gabriel Iglesias’s Netflix Comedy special. The scope of the project consisted of us custom fabricating and installing ALL the scenic elements in 4 weeks. The range of different scenic elements that each required different methods of fabrication was extremely high.  The planning and preparation and time it took to create all the different shop drawings based on the scenic construction took up the first week of the build. This left us with only 3 weeks to bring together a ton of moving parts and execute it.

scenic construction- columns
Scenic Columns

The difficulty level of this scenic construction project was pretty high because most of the fabrication consisted of welded steel framing. For instance, the curved walls had to be a welded steel frame which meant we had to bend square tubing into perfect compound curves. The ceiling consisted of several grid frames we welded up in order to create the arch. The huge columns were each a different size and cut to sit at an angle inside a steel frame. One other aspect of this scenic construction project that made it difficult is that almost all of the elements had to have DMX controlled led lights running along them, it was several hundred feet. Oh, and the last wrench thrown into the mix was the Toyota center would not allow any of the stage design scenic elements to be anchored into the stage deck.

Fabrication

It took about 30 craftsmen to complete the fabrication of this stage design. Welders, carpenters, scenic painters, electricians, CNC operators, all worked together in one fast-paced adrenaline-fueled race to meet the deadline. In order to meet the deadline and make everything come together smoothly, we relied on the precision cutting of our CNC machines to ensure that the final scenic construction looked perfect and landed exactly within an inch of the blueprints layout.

scenic construction
scenic fabrication