Gemini x McLaren x Sphere 2025

How to make a Sphere in 3 weeks and remain sane (kind of).

For the 2025 Las Vegas Grand Prix, our team at Google Creative Lab had just under four weeks from pitch to final delivery to produce a 60-second takeover of the 150-meter Las Vegas Sphere with McLaren Racing and Gemini.

The concept wraps a single prompt around the Las Vegas skyline: “Hey Gemini, reimagine the McLaren F1 car as…” Every few seconds, the entire dome transforms into a completely different hand-crafted world: a classical zoetrope, an oil painting, a black-and-white comic book, an 8-bit arcade game, a technical blueprint, and a child’s wax crayon drawing.

Having already figured out how the Sphere worked on our 2023 takeover, I acted as creative lead on the motion side, explaining how the 360-degree spherical pipeline worked to our external motion partner, and jumping in hands-on to build and animate the entire wax crayon world myself in Cinema 4D and After Effects.

Role: Creative Lead & Motion Director (concept, spherical pipeline supervision, and hands-on 2D/3D animation on the Wax Crayon sequence).

01. Pitching Six Worlds at Warp Speed

Before touching a single final keyframe, we had to get the concept approved across multiple teams on a tight race-week clock. Instead of pitching flat moodboards, we used Nano Banana and Veo to generate animated spherical mockups of all six art styles mapped right onto the Las Vegas skyline.

Being able to “jump to the end” during the pitch phase meant everyone could immediately feel how a comic book or a wax-crayon desert would read at 150 meters wide, locking the creative direction in days rather than weeks.

The unforgiving equirectangular UV distortion template required to wrap the Las Vegas Sphere without pinching at the pole.

01. Classical Zoetrope

02. Oil Painting

03. Comic Book

04. 8-Bit Arcade Game

05. Technical Blueprint

06. Wax Crayon Drawing

02. Building the Wax Crayon World in Two Days

Here is the catch when an AI-assisted pitch gets approved: you can’t just stretch a low-resolution AI video across a 16K LED dome. Once the wax-crayon sequence was greenlit, I had two days to build it for real at full spherical resolution.

Instead of asking AI for a finished shot, I used Nano Banana like a rapid illustration department: generating hundreds of individual wax-crayon assets (trees, helicopters, casinos, clouds, desert cactuses), cutting them out on alpha, and bringing them straight into a traditional Cinema 4D, Photoshop, and After Effects compositing pipeline.

03. Stitching the 360° Strip & Green-Screen Loops

In Photoshop and After Effects, I stitched the crayon desert and the Las Vegas Strip across a seamless 360-degree horizon, layered in the racetrack, animated the McLaren F1 cars roaring around the equator, and populated the foreground with parallax crayon trees.

For secondary motion in the background, like the rollercoaster looping behind the skyline, I generated crayon animations in Veo on a bright green screen, keyed them out, and tracked them directly into the master After Effects comp.

Green-screen Veo rollercoaster loop keyed and tracked into the background skyline.

Step-by-step compositing passes across the 360° horizon: sky, desert & Strip, track + McLaren F1 cars, and foreground parallax foliage.