Why the biggest canvas needs the most self-control.
Think of astonishment as money in a fixed account. Every time you astonish an audience, you spend some, and the balance doesn't refill during the show. Spend it all in the first ten minutes and the finale is broke. This, more than any budget line, is the economics that actually governs a large live event.
I learned to respect it on the Expo 2020 Dubai ceremonies. The Al Wasl dome — 130 metres across, effectively an unlimited canvas — made the temptation almost irresistible: fill it, constantly, because you can. But a dome that never rests stops being astonishing within about a minute and a half. The eye adjusts. The spectacular becomes the baseline, and now you have nowhere left to go.
So the real design discipline was working out where to spend and where to save. When to let the biggest surface anyone's ever handed you go quiet, or nearly dark, so that the peak you've been climbing toward actually reads as a peak rather than more of the same.
I keep coming back to one idea — theatre has to astonish — and it's true, but it's easy to read as "astonish constantly." It means the opposite. It means engineer one astonishment properly, and treat everything else as the runway that makes it possible.
The practical takeaway travels well beyond stages. Whatever you're making — a talk, a product, a pitch — you probably have room for one genuinely surprising thing. Find it, protect it, and resist the urge to add a second. Two surprises halve each other. One, well-placed, is what people carry home.
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About Patrick Larsen
Patrick Larsen is an Emmy Award–winning production designer and the founder of Studio Bound, the Singapore studio he established in 2015. Over more than twenty-five years he has designed immersive experiences, themed attractions, live shows, ceremonies and broadcast environments — including the Expo 2020 Dubai ceremonies at the Al Wasl dome, Olympic broadcast environments for the Vancouver 2010 and Rio 2016 Games, Las Vegas residencies (Bob Marley Hope Road at Mandalay Bay, 2025), the opening-ceremony shows for IAAPA Expo since 2024, and a continuing partnership with Taman Safari Indonesia on Varuna, Lila and Marine Safari Bali. He gave a keynote, Spaces That Speak, at World Stage Design Sharjah 2025, and is currently writing his first book, on the craft of creativity. — patricklarsen.studio
