AABA Lounge

Gensler’s Digital Experience Design (DXD) team commissioned ambient video content for large-format screens throughout the new American Airlines / British Airways lounge at JFK. The brief was nature-driven visuals that would shift with the time of day — calm enough for a premium lounge, but rich enough to hold attention on screens spanning entire walls.

I built a parametric rendering framework in Unreal Engine that could batch-produce every combination of vegetation biome — dunes, ferns, garden, and mountain — across five time-of-day lighting presets: morning, sunrise, afternoon, sunset, and midnight. Rather than hand-animate twenty separate scenes, I set up swappable biome modules and a lighting rig that could be driven by parameters, then let the engine render all twenty combinations as final-frame video output.

Most of the creative work went into dialing in fog density, cinematic camera settings, and time-of-day color grading so that each biome felt cohesive across every lighting condition. The delivered content is time-synced to real time at the airport, so the screens reflect the actual time of day outside.