Some work is defined by its scale. Some by its stakes. The work Studio Bound does is defined by both simultaneously.

A 130-metre projection dome that must feel intimate. A broadcast environment that reads identically for a stadium audience and a television viewer watching from a different continent. A themed attraction that needs to look exactly right on its thousandth day of operation. These are the conditions production designer Patrick Larsen designs for.

I founded Studio Bound in Singapore, and over two decades I’ve built environments behind some of the world’s most watched productions — Expo 2020 Dubai, Olympic broadcasts for Vancouver and Rio, Universal Studios Singapore, Singapore’s National Day Parade, broadcast sets for BBC Sport, CNN, and NBC. Here is what that work actually demands.

Small Stages, Large Lessons

Production design at global scale started in regional theater. Small stages, a few hundred seats, budgets that forced creativity over spending. Close enough to the audience that every material decision was visible.

Those early years produced the lesson that shapes every Studio Bound project since: audiences remember what they see, but they hold onto what they feel. The emotional memory outlasts the visual one.

Small venues stripped away the option of relying on spectacle. Patrick Larsen had to design for psychological impact — for the precise lighting cue that reframes an entire scene, for the scenic element that makes a performance land in the chest rather than the air. Constraints forced experimentation with projection mapping and scrim, learning which fabrics respond to light, which throw distances produce which results. Most experiments failed. The ones that succeeded became the technical foundation for work that would eventually reach billions of viewers.

The Indirect Path to Global Production Design

Years of freelance scenic design across the US, Cyprus, and South America led into agencies — VP Design Director at Jack Morton Worldwide in New York, building broadcast and live event environments during the years when multimedia integration was emerging. Then Chief Creative Officer at Pico Art International in Singapore by 2012. Studio Bound founded in 2015.

Singapore was a deliberate choice for an Emmy Award-winning production designer building a global practice. The city occupies a genuine meeting point between Eastern and Western markets. Designing for truly global audiences — not Western work exported globally, but work rooted in cross-cultural understanding — requires the cultural fluency that Singapore demands and develops continuously.

Studio Bound is built as a fully integrated practice: designers, concept artists, technical drafters, and production managers share the same workspace from first sketch. Creative vision and engineering constraints stay in constant dialogue. Problems that surface late are crises; problems that surface early are just design challenges.

What Global-Scale Production Design Actually Requires

Expo 2020 Dubai’s opening ceremony placed 192 nations beneath Al Wasl Plaza’s 130-metre dome — the world’s largest 360-degree projection surface at the time. Thousands present in person. Millions on broadcast. One environment serving every one of them simultaneously.

The Vancouver Winter Olympics (2010) and Rio Summer Olympics (2016) required broadcast production environments for NBC Universal, BBC, CTV, and international networks. Designing for cameras and designing for live audiences are fundamentally different problems that must both be solved within the same physical space. A BDA Gold Award and Canadian Gemini nomination came from Vancouver. The real education was understanding precisely why those two audiences require separate thinking.

Universal Studios Singapore presented a third category: permanent themed installations that must survive thousands of daily visitors for years while maintaining experiential integrity. Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios Singapore demanded a different discipline: environments built to produce sustained fear at scale, reset-able nightly, durable enough for thousands of guests moving through tight spaces across forty-plus consecutive nights of operation. The design had to work on the thousandth guest the same way it worked on the first.

Constraints Focus Creativity — They Don’t Limit It

The production design industry tends to treat constraints as obstacles. Patrick Larsen’s two decades of experience show the opposite. Technical constraints define what actually matters. The 130-metre dome is not a restriction on creativity — it is the design brief. The broadcast camera specifications are not limitations — they identify what the design must achieve.

Theater instilled this instinct. When budget eliminates most options, you cannot afford decorative thinking. Every choice must justify its emotional and functional contribution. That discipline transfers directly to productions of any scale — and becomes more valuable as budgets grow, because the cost of losing focus grows proportionally.

Design as Infrastructure for Shared Experience

Spectacle alone has never been the goal of Studio Bound’s production design work. Environments that are technically impressive but emotionally empty are abundant, and they leave no lasting mark.

The work worth doing builds shared ground. When 192 nations are present at an Expo ceremony, the designed environment is either enabling a genuine collective moment or merely providing backdrop. Those are not the same thing. When millions watch an Olympic broadcast, the design either extends a genuine invitation across cultural difference or defaults to something generic. When families enter Universal Studios Singapore, they are inside a story — or they are simply moving through a building.

This is what theatrical training gives a production designer that purely technical expertise does not: the understanding that all the craft — every lighting angle, every projection choice, every material — serves one purpose. Making audiences feel something specific. That’s the work.

About Patrick Larsen

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: The Craft of Spectacle | The Journey