Cartier Women’s Pavillion Expo 2020 Dubai
2021, Dubai - UAE

As Animation Supervisor and Technical Content Director with the talented team at MagicBird Studio, Paris, I contributed to the conception and execution of two landmark projection-mapping projects commissioned by Auditoire UAE and Luxury Makers Arabia. These projects marked the opening of the Women’s Pavilion and the International Women’s Day celebrations hosted by Cartier at Expo 2020 Dubai, beneath the iconic Al Wasl Dome — the architectural centerpiece of the Expo and the world’s largest 360° projection surface. Spanning 130 meters in diameter and rising 67.5 meters in height, the dome’s steel trellis and translucent PTFE-coated membrane provided an extraordinary yet technically demanding canvas, requiring the creation of visuals at extreme resolutions and with flawless continuity across a hemispherical 360° field. Over a five-month production process, I led a team of motion designers, designing tailored preview and simulation workflows to ensure accuracy, while coordinating multiple rehearsals at the challenging venue to refine timing, integration, and performance synchronization. Within this monumental space, our visuals became the backdrop to an inspiring program that featured a piano recital by Khatia Buniatishvili, a ballet performance by Diana Vishneva and Denis Savin in perfect harmony with the projections, the evocative spoken-word artistry of Emi Mahmoud, a motivational address from Christine Lagarde on women’s leadership, and a poetic performance by Cartier ambassador Rami Malek. Together, these elements created a celebration of women as global change-makers, embodying the belief that when women thrive, humanity thrives — and I had the privilege of directing the technical and creative content that unified this spectacular event on one of the most ambitious projection stages in the world.

Role: Animation Supervisor, Motion Designer, Technical Content Director
Client: Auditoire UAE and Luxury Makers Arabia
Design Studio: MagicBird Studio
Producer: Julien Leur, Etienne Gerbal
Motion Design: Fehmican Gözüm, Anthony DeJeune, Nicolas Pomet, MagicBird Studio
Sound Design: The Untold / Secession Studios
Project Cordinator:
Production manager: Julie Vifquain
Project manager: Laure Paris
Creative director: Jean-Baptiste Cabrera Casasoprana
Technical Director: Stéphane Simmat
Photo credits of the show : © Saï / Stéphane Aït Ouarab
Music : © The Untold / Secession Studios
Venue: Al-Wasl Dome Dubai Expo 2020

Documentation Video >>

Technical Breakdown >>

The Al Wasl Dome at Expo 2020 Dubai is one of the most ambitious projection surfaces ever created — a 130-meter-wide, 67.5-meter-tall architectural centerpiece that doubles as a translucent 360° canvas. Its intricate steel trellis supports a fiberglass membrane that covers more than 25,000 m², visible both from the interior and the exterior, making it the largest immersive projection dome in the world. To illuminate this monumental surface, 252 pure laser projectors were installed in 42 climate-controlled pods around the perimeter, each pod housing six projectors with automated alignment and servicing systems. The playback infrastructure included 16 media servers, orchestrating content across the dome as if it were a seamless hemispherical screen equivalent to a staggering 27,000 × 6,000-pixel canvas. The result is an immersive, shared visual environment where advanced technology and architecture merge into a singular cultural stage.

Designing content for this canvas presented extraordinary technical challenges. A surface of that size and resolution cannot be approached with conventional pipelines, so I developed a suite of preview, simulation, and export templates that became the backbone of the production. To manage the massive resolution, the dome was divided into 11 mapped segments, with each scene requiring delivery of 44 files along with proxy versions for faster iteration.
The true challenge, however, was enabling a team of motion designers to think and create natively for a 360° spherical environment. To solve this, I built a real-time After Effects preview system that mapped their work directly onto a 3D model of the dome as they animated, letting them see how their content wrapped around the structure in real time. This same template also allowed us to generate accurate simulation files for client presentations during the five-month production process, ensuring alignment between creative intent and technical execution.

Beyond the workflows, I supervised the team through multiple rehearsals at the challenging venue, refining timing and synchronization between visuals and performances, and ensuring flawless integration on site. This combination of custom tool design, pipeline management, and live adaptation was essential to delivering cohesive, high-resolution visuals on a projection surface of unprecedented scale and complexity.