NATO Summits Brussels

2017-2018

Production World

Set / Production Design / Supervision

Intro

It took about 1200 truckloads of materials and equipment to make this one happen...

2017. Production World had asked me to be part of their creative team for the NATO meeting of heads of state at NATO headquarters in Brussels. The arrival of the leaders, the press moments, the working dinners, the handshake, the family photo, the unveiling of the monuments, etc. all had their unique design and production needs. It became a lesson in security issues, design standards and the dynamics of the NATO organization itself. Despite that, everything went well, NATO had an extraordinary summit, more than 1.2 billion people watched the show on all major media channels in the world.

After NATO's 2017 summit, Production World scrutinized the whole production process and quickly realized, to be successful at this scale, there are two essential requirements. A scalable production team, and an efficient system for large scale drawings. After a month or so of hard work, the theoretical team became agile by a keen combination of organizational charts and customized project management software. Furthermore, an innovative approach to CAD design reduced file sizes by a massive 75%, ensured scalability at the design department, and production drawings became far more accessible to any user...

2018. This one took up the larger part of this year. Production World asked me to be their set designer and chief Computer-Aided Design for NATO's 2018 summit at NATO Headquarters, Brussels. On June 11-12, 29 heads of state met at the new NATO headquarters to have several official moments together. Early this year, a team of Dutch and Belgian design and production experts joined up to make all of this happen.