The Art and Craft of Scenic Design and Fabrication

Scenic design and fabrication have to work together to produce compelling and memorable trade show exhibits. What you dream, you have to be able to build.

At The Shop at Show Ready , our scenic design and fabrication teams work in harmony. What we dream, we have built and delivered for client after client. Let’s take a look at some of our previous work that showcases the best of our scenic design and fabrication skills.

Fortnite

We’ve partnered with FG|PG and Epic Games a number of times to promote the smash hit multiplayer video game Fortnite. For PAX West, we created a special trade show exhibit for the Fortnite Summer Skirmish Series, an epic eight-week tournament with $8 million in prize money.

When designing the exhibit, FG|PG leaned into the many rich and varied environments the game offered. To fit the summer theme, they art directed a mini-golf experience, which allowed the team at Show Ready to add our scenic expertise to the mix. This included engineering and fabrication of scenic elements including a number of mini-golf holes: a pirate ship, drive-in movie theater, desert oasis, and pizzeria.

Our fabrication team worked with hand and automated tools to make this design come to life from scratch. Check out our behind-the-scenes video to see how we constructed a camel, golf signs, and even an oversized toilet using wood, foam, and a colorful palette of paints.

Marvel Snap

For New York Comic Con, we partnered with FG|PG to promote Marvel’s new card game Marvel SNAP. This exciting game brought together characters from all across the Marvel multiverse, allowing players to mix and match characters that had never been paired before in endless battle combinations.

Our scenic design had to please longtime Marvel fans who would surely be scrutinizing every inch for accuracy. We built several famous locations from the Marvel multiverse, including the Daily Bugle building, an NYC bodega, the entrance to Oscorp, and the law office of Nelson & Murdock from Daredevil. Our artists had to perfect the smallest details, including painting the structures to look like brick, weathering them to look like a lived-in city, adding details like door knobs, a rusted air conditioning unit, outdoor billboards, wheatpasted posters, and more.

The centerpiece of the exhibit was the Marvel Collector’s Cube Experience. Once inside, visitors were surrounded by digital projections of custom animated content cascading off of two-way mirrors. FG|PG’s custom content included an infinite landscape of Marvel SNAP cards, psychedelic dreamscapes, and an immersive soundscape of SFX and character voiceovers.

The Marvel Snap Collector’s Cube Experience was the result of our scenic design and fabrication coming together with FG|PG’s design and content team to create a dazzling and immersive physical installation. We were thrilled to see dozens of top influencers sharing videos of themselves inside our meticulously crafted space.

Kratos

At Show Ready, we build not just complete exhibits, but also individual design elements. As a thank-you gift to our client Santa Monica Studios, video game developer and creator of the popular God of War series, we built a statue to decorate their office.

Featuring God of War protagonist Kratos and his son Atreus standing on top of a slain demon, this statue was hand-crafted by our skilled artists. You can see the process in our behind-the-scenes video as the life-size statue was carved out of foam and carefully painted to look like a bronze sculpture.

The statue is a combination of Santa Monica Studios’ outstanding character design and our artists’ top-tier fabrication abilities. It still stands in the Santa Monica office to this day.

Trion at E3

Another collaboration with FG|PG and a top video game developer, our exhibit for Trion Worlds at E3 brought elements of their hit video game Defiance to life.

Set in a future where aliens have begun to terraform our planet, the game allows players to explore the dramatically transformed San Francisco Bay Area and battle mutated alien creatures known as hellbugs. Our scenic design sought to convey these gameplay elements in the most exciting, dramatic fashion possible.

We brought to life FG|PG’s vision of a towering sculpture of a hellbug demolishing the Golden Gate Bridge atop a battered San Francisco road sign. Like our other custom scenic design elements, the sculpture was hand-built and painted by our master artisans. The exhibit also included a row of computers where attendees could play a preview of the studio’s next game: End of Nations.

Final Thoughts

Not every project requires the same level of scenic design. But no matter your vision, at Show Ready, we’re here to help bring it to life. Whether you’re an event and experiential agency, an ad agency, brand or corporate client team, museum creator, retailer, or anything in between, our engineers, fabricators, artists, and craftsmen will take your design and make it something your internal teams, and your consumers/attendees, will love.