Gaussian Splat Opener — Timmy Beckmann

The Brief

Open the biggest keynote of the year with something nobody had seen before.

To set the stage for Sridhar Ramaswamy's keynote at Snowflake Summit, we wanted to take the 7,000 people in the room on a photorealistic journey: from falling snow particles, through a forest, into an icy cave, and finally up to a summit peak overlooking a bed of clouds. A live violinist would accompany the piece, so the timing had to be exact. AI video models lacked the control we needed and the cost of generations stacked up fast. And the delivery format, a 143 foot LED wall, meant the resolution had to be enormous while long render times could put the whole show at risk.

The Approach

Turning a single AI still into a 3D world I could fly through.

From pencil storyboards a coworker sketched out, I generated the stills in Nano Banana Pro, so I could dial in the exact color, amount of snow, framing, and camera angle for every scene. Then, using Apple's SHARP library together with Claude Code, I built a JSX button in After Effects that converts any still into a 3D Gaussian splat in a single click. From there I could animate a 3D camera through the splats and push the particle size around for trippy effects with Irrealix's Gaussian Splat plugin. Those tools combined into a new workflow that gave me photorealistic flythroughs with complete camera and color control, all running on only three layers in After Effects. And thanks to my VFX background, I could composite in the details that bring an otherwise static splat scene to life: birds in the distance, light refracting off the ice cave walls, snow drifting past as the camera glides across the mountain.

30 minutes to render, all on a MacBook.

And now for my favorite part: the whole three minute opener, for a 143 foot screen, rendered in 30 minutes. No render farm, just my MacBook. Gaussian splats are made of hundreds of thousands of tiny points, but they're extremely efficient to render. I had hit my favorite trifecta: cheap, fast, and it looked amazing. And changes were incredibly easy to make. Wanted more snow? Generate a tweaked image, click the JSX button, done. A different camera angle? Just adjust two keyframes.

On the Wall

The Gaussian splat opener on the 143 ft LED wall at Snowflake Summit

The cherry on top was the sound design. I scored the whole piece with nature SFX, wind, footsteps crunching through snow, so the room was fully immersed before a word was spoken. Sitting in the keynote hall at Moscone when it played, with the live violinist, the lighting design, and the camera direction all hitting at once, it genuinely moved the room and set the stage for Sridhar.

How It Scales

A new signature technique every year, not a one off.

Every Summit I try to land one new frontier technique that becomes the signature of that keynote. 2025 was the microscopic snowflakes, 2026 was Gaussian splats. And the splat workflow didn't stay a one off. Because the whole multi step conversion was wired into a single button in After Effects, I could hand it to my teammates, and we used the splat treatment as palate cleansers throughout the rest of the keynote.

143 ft

LED wall (12,160×1,920px), 7,000 in the room

3 min

Fully art directed photorealistic journey

30 min

Render time, on a MacBook, no farm

30 days

Locked ahead of the show