I was brought on to help install and program a 39-foot pixel tree for Branson's 2025 Christmas season, synchronized with the neighboring 150-foot Ferris wheel. The owners wanted to keep the tree's long-standing warm-white C9 LEDs, so 4,000 RGB pixels were added alongside them, able to sync with the wheel's hourly shows.
Key challenges included smoothly fading from the warm-white lights to the pixels, keeping the tree's animation cohesive with the wheel's existing programming, and mapping custom video content onto the 360° pixel matrix. My favorite part was creating custom animations in Adobe After Effects, layered over the existing lighting cues at points throughout the shows.
These videos were recorded while a section of pixels on the wheel was having slip ring problems.