Hallway to well, well, well

Editor’s Note: As ESPN’s Associate Director of Print Production, Marketing Creative Services, Kristen Cook has had a hand in designing the company’s look. She takes Front Row on a tour of the just-christened X Games Skywalk Corridor on campus. Click on the “before” and “after” photos below.

The X Games skywalk project took a very barren section of campus, the walkway between our Digital Production Center and Building 1, and turned it into a multimedia love letter to the X Games.

The skywalk is a dogleg with a ramp at one end, so we created essentially two adjoining sections, one for the Summer Games, and one to represent the Winter Games. We wanted to create a presentation that captures the energy and culture of X Games, where the walls actually feel like they’re floating weightlessly in space.

Each corridor has two monitors showing video and still photography, and at the very bottom of the ramp there is a giant screen that hangs on a truss, very much like an actual X Games event. We used LEDs to backlight some of the walls and to add splashes of color at the ceiling.

Production took almost three weeks, with lots of prepping and head-scratching as far back as August of 2010.

During the installation in March, the corridor had to remain open to traffic. We tried not to make too much noise and keep it pretty neat. A few times people had to squeeze between ladders, but luckily not under any. Lots of Friends and Family tours came through, and we got to be on a first-name basis with the “regulars” that use the hallway.

I’m very proud of all the creative work that was put into this by so many people. It’s the most ambitious campus design project that we’ve done to date.

There are many projects in the pipeline right now. I’ll be camping out in Bristol again soon (I’m from NYC) to rev up other spaces, like the new ESPN AUDIO studios. More on that later.

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