The first set production designer Patrick Larsen built was for a theater in Utah that seated a few hundred people. Regional productions. Tight budgets. An MFA from UC San Diego and a Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival Award already in hand — and still, the first years were primarily education rather than expertise.
Technical competence proved necessary but insufficient. A precisely built set where the audience felt nothing was a failure regardless of its craft. The work serves emotional experience. Without emotional resonance, there is only execution.
Those early Utah years also produced the technical foundation for everything that followed: experimenting with projection and scrim, learning how light transforms fabric, how images behave at different scales and throw distances, how projection could replace conventional scenic elements when budgets demanded alternatives. Most experiments failed. The ones that worked established a vocabulary Patrick Larsen would still be drawing on two decades later — when the projection surface was 130 metres across and the audience was numbered in millions.
A Decade of Freelance Work Across Three Continents
From Utah, the career spread across the US, Cyprus, Indonesia, and Singapore through more than a decade of freelance work. La Jolla Playhouse. Utah Festival Opera. Long Wharf Theatre. Skylight Opera. Each production added something: new materials, a different kind of audience, a deeper understanding of what works when budget cannot substitute for clarity.
Then the agencies: Imagination in the US in 2004, then Jack Morton Worldwide in New York as VP Design Director — working on broadcast environments and major live events at the exact moment multimedia integration was becoming possible rather than exceptional. Then Chief Creative Officer at Pico Art International in Singapore in 2012. Studio Bound founded in 2015.
Singapore was a deliberate choice, not a default. An Emmy Award-winning production designer building a global practice needed to be based where East and West genuinely meet operationally, not theoretically. Cultural fluency across both markets is built continuously in Singapore in a way it cannot be built from New York or London alone.
Learning to Design for Cameras
The Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics and Rio 2016 Summer Olympics delivered the most concentrated education in a problem Patrick Larsen had not yet fully understood: broadcast production design and live event design are not the same discipline wearing different clothes. They are different disciplines that must share the same physical space.
What reads well in person regularly fails on camera. Colour science changes. Lighting for broadcast capture differs from lighting for physical atmosphere. Camera angles determine what exists and what does not. The BDA Gold Award and Canadian Gemini nomination from Vancouver were significant. The deeper value was the technical understanding of why — why the same environment reads so differently to those inside it and those watching through a lens.
What the Work Keeps Teaching
Theater trained Patrick Larsen to design for how people actually experience spaces — not how spaces appear in renders. Large-scale live events confirmed that technical precision and emotional storytelling are not competing priorities but mutually dependent ones. Broadcast work established that cameras and live audiences require different thinking within the same physical envelope.
The work continues evolving: more countries, more collaborators, more complex briefs. The foundation built in those first Utah theaters — where budget could not mask lack of clarity and every choice had to justify its presence — still runs underneath all of it.
Patrick Larsen is an Emmy Award-winning production designer and the founder of Studio Bound, based in Singapore. Over two decades, he has designed environments for global audiences — from the Expo 2020 Dubai ceremonies and Olympic broadcast sets to Las Vegas residencies, Broadway-scale theatrical productions, and permanent installations across Asia and the Middle East. Studio Bound takes projects from concept to build with one fully integrated team of designers, concept artists, technical drafters, and production managers. Visit studiobound.sg or read more at patricklarsen.studio
Further reading: Patrick Larsen: Two Decades of Design Across Five Continents | The Journey
