For years, the tree had been illuminated with warm-white C9 LEDs, which the owners wanted to keep. New for 2025 was the addition of 4,000 RGB pixels, which could be synchronized to the hourly shows of the Ferris wheel towering behind it. In doing so, I had to develop a way to fade the warm-white lights out while seamlessly transitioning to the pixels.

While I have been programming holiday light shows since I was thirteen, these shows proved to be challenging because I was tasked with keeping the overall look and feel of the tree’s animation cohesive with the existing programming of the Ferris wheel.

This project also forced me to learn how to seamlessly map custom video content onto the 360° matrix. Truth be told, my favorite part of the project was creating custom animations in Adobe After Effects, which were overlaid on top of the existing lighting cues at various points during the shows.