By John Paul Rowan
Chief Marketing Officer at the Savannah College of Art and Design
As LA Knight came charging towards the floodlit ring, TV viewers were as dazzled by the live broadcast’s graphics as they were by the wrestler’s glistening pectorals. The brawling brute’s helmet logo and inter-dimensional palm trees glowed as 3D motion graphics turned the arena into the visual equivalent of a spinning facebuster. The effect was pure, next-level excitement.
That graphics package, presented as part of an April 2023 SmackDown in Corpus Christi, Texas, was the product of a 10-week collaborative course between World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) and SCADpro, the innovation studio of the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). SCAD students from disciplines including animation, visual effects, interactive design and game development, fashion marketing and management, and user experience design all contributed to the project, earning valuable professional experience and national exposure. And, for the record, LA Knight beat Butch by pinfall.
“It was a great privilege and a fantastic result to have our students’ work broadcast for the LA Knight intro and a testament to what is possible when SCAD students from multiple degree programs come together,” said SCAD associate chair of interactive design and game development Eric Allen. “We created multiple iterations of concept work before we started the 3D creation, and we animated different possible intros for multiple athletes with respect to cameras that were used in the stadium. It was up to WWE to use what they liked best.”
Clearly, WWE liked it very much: The wrestling promotion is now in its third year of partnership with SCADpro.
That alliance exemplifies the top-level design challenges students execute through the university’s innovation studio. Every year, SCADpro generates more than 50 discrete, industry-sponsored projects, pairing innovative companies with the brightest creative students, alumni, and professors. SCADpro is recognized as the preeminent university partner in higher education, on par with premier design agencies worldwide, generating new ideas and products for the world’s most influential brands, including Delta Air Lines, Google, Nike, Adult Swim, CBS Sports, and Deloitte.
The SCADpro mission — “to connect current and future art and design professionals with business leaders to find creative and inventive solutions to real-world challenges” — has produced gratified clients from Fortune 500 and small-cap companies alike. If WWE grapples at one end of the cultural spectrum, a different lane emerged via a SCADpro project with David Yurman.
“David Yurman is rightly known as America’s foremost luxury jewelry brand, and SCAD is proud to have partnered with Yurman since 2021, jointly creating The David Yurman Endowed Scholarship for Jewelry Design. That level of trust helped facilitate David Yurman engaging the SCADpro studio to create the brand’s first extended reality project for the holiday 2023 season.”
SCADpro students used SCAD’s cutting-edge LED-volume to create the successful and highly immersive campaign known as ‘Create Joy, Give David Yurman.’ “The success of that campaign demonstrated that students who participate in SCADpro projects graduate having done work at the highest level of professional refinement,” Rowan said. “We have seen how these projects lead to direct hires by the companies that SCADpro works with, consistently providing graduating students with a jumpstart to their creative careers.”
SCAD film and television alum Dawson Cifarelli was a senior when he directed the David Yurman 60-second branded film, part of a core team of undergraduate and graduate students from diverse SCAD degree programs, including advertising, production design, illustration, social strategy and management, industrial design, and illustration. “The David Yurman brand is so rooted in the arts, and that’s what made it such a fun story to tell,” said Cifarelli. “Working on the LED volume and utilizing real-time rendering technology meant we were able to create a magical city environment that we couldn’t get in person, merging the real and unreal worlds with CGI and software like Disguise and Unreal Engine.”
Then there was the Yurman project’s human talent: The SCADpro student team worked with some of the best in the industry, including stylist George Cortina, models Maya Stepper and Laurence Coke, and iconic set designer Stefan Beckman to create the campaign. The experience left students changed.
“Seeing it on-screen, with actors, was a dream come true,” said dramatic writing student Meliah Hipp, who penned the script. “It was like a part of me was part of the brand, and I realized what’s possible to achieve. I’m literally a different person now.”
From the diamond bracelet to the wrestling ring, SCADpro continues to produce innovative solutions to business and design challenges. Limitless potential, strong industry partnerships, and stunning student work all point to a bright, creative future.
For more information on SCADpro, visit Scad.edu/scadpro.
This article appeared in the 2025 edition of the Creative Economy Journal. See more from the Journal here.
