Once upon a time I was an intern at D’Amico Studios during the yesteryears of college days swiftly passing. I spent my days setting up the studio for photo shoots, backing up files and editing a long and meticulous project called “The Lost Archive.” Under the same roof at 314 Brown Street in Northern Liberties, Ricardo Rivera’s Klip Collective was innovating project mapping and creating monstrous holograms. One of my favorite projects was Carmelo Anthony’s Nike Shoe Release Party at Pier 54 in New York City where they created a 48-foot hologram of Melo doing basketball tricks projected on water shooting out of the river.

Four years and many projects later, Ric and the team are taking on the largest amount of surface area they have ever mapped with “Nightscapes,” which is set to open today and run until October 31st at Longwood Gardens, 1001 Longwood Rd, Kennett Square, Pa. 19348.

The entire process — from scouting, design, production, to mapping and more — was a product of a years worth of work from over 30 members of the Klip staff. Ric gave me the low-down on some of the important folks that made the magic happen.

“Josh James is my installation designer/director and has been invaluable. My animation team is the best, I’ve had Whitney Alexander, Masa Wakabayashi, Thom Roland and others creating a nice range of content for me. Kevin Ritchie is always there, not only documenting my tests in the garden, but having him there for creative has been key. My production team has been top notch. Natalie Weiss has gone above and beyond on this project, Marie Partriarca, the Executive Producer, as well.”

Klip animator Whitney Alexander spoke about his creative role in the development of Nightscapes:

“After completing a huge projection mapping installation in Moscow back in August of 2014, Klip decided to assign me the role of Lead Animator for the Longwood Gardens project. Each section that I worked on had a different type of inspiration. For example the Musical Sequence that can be seen at the Topiary Garden. A lot of those type of horns and “music machines” were greatly inspired by Dr. Seuss books. The ghostly white creatures in the Large Lake installation were greatly inspired by the forest spirits seen in Miyazaki’s animated feature film “Princess Monoke”. Ricardo really wanted to push the idea of a dream world or dreamscape if you will. And he used a lot of Miyazaki’s work as a way of showing us the type of look that he wanted to create.”

Nightscapes features an original score from Jon Barthmus of Sun Airway, Julian Grefe and Justin Gellar of Pink Skull, Thom Rolland of Broadzilla, and Josh James.

I asked Ric what was next on the horizon for Klip Collective,

“Can’t say, NDAs, dog.

For now check out the exhibit at Longwood Gardens. You can visit http://longwoodgardens.org/nightscape for more info.