From Theme Park Creative Director To A Dinner Table On 30A
The last major production I led before starting The Table 30A was a nighttime spectacular designed for a theme park audience of tens of thousands. Months of development. A team of specialists. A budget that could fund a small movie. Projection mapped on buildings, water, fire, sound systems that could shake your chest from two hundred meters away.
The first Table 30A event was a proof-of-concept dinner for a handful of people. Two people produced it: me and a chef. The projections hit a dinner table, not a building. The audience was close enough to touch the art. The food was the centerpiece, not a concession stand a quarter mile away.
On paper, the transition looks like a step backward. In practice, it was the most creatively meaningful decision I have ever made. This article is about why I walked away from the biggest stages in the world to build something small, personal, and entirely my own.
What I Had
As a Creative Director based in Montreal and Tokyo, I led the design of nighttime spectaculars for major and minor theme parks around the world. I worked on projects at multiple Disney parks, Universal Studios, Dollywood, and Presidential Libraries. I worked in Europe, the Middle East, and across the United States.
The work was extraordinary in many ways. The budgets were large. The technology was cutting edge. The audiences were massive. And when a show landed the way it was designed to, the feeling of watching thousands of people react simultaneously to something I had built was genuinely powerful.
I was good at it. I understood how to structure a show for emotional impact. I understood how to manage the complexity of large-scale multimedia productions. I understood the intersection of creative vision and technical execution. I had spent my career building toward this role, from the Echo Park music venue to touring with bands to the creative studio to this. By conventional measures, I had arrived.
What Was Missing
The thing that was missing is hard to articulate, but I will try. At theme park scale, the audience is anonymous. You are designing for everyone and therefore for no one in particular. The show runs the same way whether the audience is engaged or checking their phones. There is no feedback loop between the audience and the art. The experience is broadcast, not shared.
I wanted to build something where the audience was part of the work. Where their presence and behavior shaped what happened. Where the experience could not exist without the specific people in the room.
The interactive projection system I built for The Table 30A is the technological answer to that desire. It tracks the movement of hands, glasses, and plates and generates visuals that respond in real time. But the deeper answer is the format itself: twelve people at a communal table, eating five courses of food, inside a story that unfolds through technology that responds to them. The audience is not watching the show. They are inside it. They are making it with me, whether they know it or not.
That was the thing I could not build at theme park scale. And it was the thing I needed to build.
Why 30A
I grew up on 30A. When I was working in Montreal and Tokyo and traveling the world for projects, 30A was still home. Coming back was not a retreat. It was a return to the place where I wanted to plant something.
The area has qualities that serve the work perfectly. The outdoor spaces are beautiful and varied. The weather supports open-air events most of the year. There is a creative community here that most visitors do not see, artists, chefs, makers who care about craft. And the people who visit 30A are the kind of people who are open to a genuinely new experience.
I had participated three times in Digital Graffiti at Alys Beach, which gave me a local connection to the creative community. In 2019, I built interactive swing sets that interacted with a projection-mapped building and created a soundscape in real time. That project showed me that the 30A audience would engage with interactive digital art if it was presented well. The Table 30A grew directly from that confidence. I wrote about the Digital Graffiti work in My Three Appearances At Digital Graffiti In Alys Beach.
The First Show
The first Table 30A event was a test. I wanted to know if the concept worked. Could I take the skills I had developed at massive scale and apply them to a dinner table? Could the technology translate? Would the food and the media and the story come together in a way that moved people?
The answer was yes. The first show was a creative success, and it gave me the confidence to push the concept forward. I reworked the technology for the second show to make the installation movable and to enable interactive media on all projectors. Each show has been an evolution, and each one has confirmed that the decision to leave theme parks was the right one.
I am building something that could not exist at theme park scale. Something where the audience matters as individuals, not as a crowd. Something where a chef and a digital artist sit down together, talk about what inspires them, and build an evening from scratch. Something where the most powerful moment of the night might be a spoken interview between me and my mother played over a dessert made from a family fudge recipe.
That is not a theme park show. It is The Table 30A. And it is exactly what I was looking for. I wrote about what that first show taught us in What We Learned From Our Very First Table 30A Show.
FAQ
Do you miss working at theme park scale?
I miss certain aspects, the collaborative energy of large teams and the thrill of massive audiences. But The Table 30A gives me creative freedom and intimate connection that large-scale work cannot. The trade-off is one I would make again every time.
Could The Table 30A work at a larger scale?
The intimacy is the point. The communal table, the interactive projections, the twelve-person maximum, these are design choices that serve the experience. I am interested in scaling by producing more events, potentially in more locations, rather than by making individual events larger.
Will you ever go back to theme parks?
My focus is The Table 30A and the immersive dining format. What I am building here has more personal meaning and creative potential than anything I have done before. For my vision of what comes next, see The Future Of The Table 30A.
What is the biggest difference between theme park work and The Table 30A?
At a theme park, the audience watches the show. At The Table 30A, the audience is part of the show. The interactive projections respond to guest behavior, which means every event produces a unique visual experience co-created by the people at the table.
