Once a year, NEXT brings together restaurant owners, partners, and staff from across the country. Ten thousand people in a San Diego convention center, a lot of whom run their own restaurants and spend the rest of the year a long way from each other. Before anybody walked on stage to talk, that very big room needed to feel like one very small room.
This is a company built one person at a time. Somebody holding the door, somebody remembering your name. A big shiny opener could have easily felt like it belonged to some other company. So we built it out of their own story and put every single person in the room inside it.
It started before the show did. We brought in visual artists who'd worked on the Sphere and wrapped the hall in the company's history, millions of pixels of it, so people walked in through the story of the thing they've spent their careers building.
Then the lights went down and a magical cow walked up and knocked on a red door. Everyone in that room knew that door. It's the front of the restaurant where the whole thing started. It opened, and the whole room came with it. Dancers, a drumline, and the name of every person in attendance rolling across the screens, all set to "Together" by Norman.
Most of the work happened months before load-in. With choreographer Brooke Bowe, we built the music track first, then built the graphics frame by frame to match every move. We flew in extra dancers from Los Angeles and had three days to rehearse in San Diego. One tech. Then it went live in front of 10,000 people, and an opener doesn't get a second take.
Nobody hands you a scorecard after an opener. You're standing in the back with a headset on, and you find out right there with everybody else whether it worked.
When the names started rolling across those giant LED screens, people started finding themselves up there. The whole place gasped, then cheered. I knew it was coming. I'd seen those graphics more times than I can count. It still got me. That's my favorite part of this job: when a room full of people feels something for the first time, and it catches you off guard right along with them.
