VSS starts with the most ambitious version of the project. Budget, venue constraints, and timeline shape what it becomes. The design always begins at the upper limit of what's possible, not at the safe middle ground.
The process starts with the creative vision. What is the music, what are the constraints, what does this need to feel like for the people in the room. Those parameters inform everything that follows: the technical drawings, the rigging plot, the pixel map, the automation infrastructure.
Most clients don't fully understand what they want until they see it in three dimensions. The previs process exists for that reason. VSS builds the show in Capture before it exists anywhere in the physical world. Lighting patch, fixture IDs, NDI signal from Resolume to the render server, pixel map visualised in 3D so the content lives in the right place rather than on a flat diagram. The previs is where cost and ambition meet reality, and where the decisions that matter most get made.
When automation is involved the planning goes deeper. Chain sliders, cable picks, signal distribution through a moving structure. Every cable run needs an additional 15 metres of allowance for the pace of travel. The safe speed of that travel is determined by third party engineering sign-off. VSS produces the structural files in Vectorworks, runs the load calculations through Brace Works, and provides the outputs to the engineer. That document then governs the automation programming.
The decisions in a show design project don't happen in isolation. They compound. Each one has second-order consequences for the next ten. They happen in specific sequences. The most technically complex aspect of any show is not a single challenge. It's the interdependency of a hundred micro-decisions running in parallel, each one show-critical.
VSS operates on a lean model because most of the equipment is in-house. The R&D happens at VS Immersive, 20m from the warehouse, with hands-on access to nearly every asset that's going on the show. The design is never at the mercy of what a third-party vendor has available.
