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Name: Anthony “JANNOOTZ” Jannuzzi

Title: Lighting Designer

Years Worked at VT: 3 years and 3 months

Favorite Project: The Crayola Experience in Chandler, Arizona. It was cool to work on a project where I knew that the community I grew up in was going to benefit from it. It’s a fun attraction and a fun place to go. Everything and every building right now is so modern and grayscale and Crayola is an explosion of color! The whole team is really great to work with. And you get a free crayon!

Funniest or most memorable memory at Visual Terrain: When some of the team went to Meow Wolf in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was fun and interesting to experience the world and really cool to interact with the team. It was a unique experience to be a group of lighting designers in an environment that is saturated with lighting. The best part was when the team met up after going through the experience, sitting at a table and discussing the different approaches we all took while exploring the spaces. It was awesome to get to a point where we knew we were friends as well as co-workers. It was a great team building experience. 

Favorite Aspect of Lighting Design: It’s the way that lighting can enhance a place. Lighting adds sparkle, it adds flare, character, emphasis. It can bring out the cool things in a sculpture or building. It’s the way that adding the extra layer of lighting adds life to inanimate objects. There’s a huge difference. It’s like watching a show in work lights versus stage lights. It enhances everything. Just having the right light on a picture can cause things to be seen completely differently. It’s not a linear thing, it’s exponential.

What/Who Inspires You: I’m inspired by nature. The natural world. Growing up in Phoenix I got to experience the desert sky, which is something that is ever-present. I have to say Phoenix has the best sunsets — it has something to do with the dust in the air and the way the clouds sit in the sky. It looks like the sky is on fire. When you see the rays shooting through the clouds it’s really cool. The Aurora Borealis, Yosemite. Nature gives us so many opportunities to experience natural light, not man-made. There’s some sort of mystical, magical, and scientific thing about lighting. The light in places with no electric light — it can be mysterious, incredible.

Fun Fact About Yourself that No One Knows: I’m an avid Dungeons and Dragons player! My favorite class to play is a druid. I like to play a character that can help the party out. I also think if you are going to be playing a game based in fantasy you better be using magic! I like support casters. I like to help my party succeed. The game is about the group achieving a goal and telling a good story. 

It’s fun to be someone else for a while. It’s fun to get into another person’s headspace and think about what that person would do versus what I would do. 

One of the cool things about it is that it lets you and your friends experience a thing that you never did. It gives you this shared memory of this thing you did together that you never actually did together.

What is your favorite part about being a lighting designer? You get to bring your unique sense of design to build something that people enjoy. You get to contribute to really cool projects and you get to knit everything together. The lighting really congeals it all into one whole. You get the chance to be a part of other people’s memories.