When Universal Orlando set out to create its next nighttime show, the team saw an opportunity to do more than update a guest favourite. CineSational: A Symphonic Spectacular signifies a new chapter in the park’s approach to large-scale entertainment, one driven by teamwork, technology, and resilience.
Development of CineSational began amidst the aftermath of Hurricane Ian, which had damaged much of the lagoon’s show infrastructure.
Instead of succumbing to the setback, the Universal Orlando Entertainment team, in collaboration with TAIT and a network of partners, viewed this as a turning point, demonstrating remarkable resilience and creativity that resulted in something entirely new and innovative.
The outcome integrates various disciplines, including choreographed fountains, synchronised drones, projection mapping, custom animations, media, and pyrotechnics, all managed through a custom adaptive control system that adjusts to conditions in real-time.
We speak to Mike Aiello, senior director of entertainment creative development at Universal Orlando, alongside TAIT’s Jason McManus, principal and CineSational’s executive creative director, and Jim Shumway, TAIT’s vice president of project delivery, about how the project redefined the relationship between creative vision and technical design.
They also discuss how it reflects a broader trend in themed entertainment, where innovation grows not only from new technology but also from collaboration and adaptability.
Celebrating Universal’s past, present, and future
CineSational, which opened in June 2024, runs nightly during the season, with a break for the resort’s popular Halloween Horror Nights event.
“Whenever we're not doing Horror Nights, it is our nighttime spectacular that ends our guests’ day,” explains Aiello, who began his career at Universal as a writer for the spooky event in the early 2000s.
Jason McManus, Jim Shumway, and Mike Aiello
With the new show opening ahead of Universal Epic Universe, the vision was to create something that celebrated Universal’s past, present, and future.
“Our show really runs the gamut as far as the collection of characters and moments that our guests experience at Universal Orlando,” says Aiello.
“It goes from nostalgia with Jaws and Back to the Future, through our present, like Shrek and Fast and Furious, and hints at what was our future, prior to Epic opening, with How to Train Your Dragon and our Universal Monsters.”
TAIT and Universal: a strong partnership
TAIT and Universal have had a long-standing partnership. McManus, brought on as creative director for CineSational through TAIT, says Universal approached the company at the beginning of this project with the intention of raising the bar and creating something truly ambitious:
“We worked hand in hand to develop a product that was not just great in terms of storytelling and its ability to capture the audience, but that pushed the boundaries of what was possible from a technical standpoint.”
Aiello says of the TAIT team:
“TAIT is the name of the company, but it's really about the people. I can't speak highly enough of Jason and the entire TAIT video team.”
Creating CineSational
CineSational combines dramatic water effects, projection mapping, animation, pyrotechnics, and a responsive control system that adapts to environmental conditions. It also features innovations in fountain design, integrated control systems, and coordinated drones — a first for a Universal park.
“It's a massive collection of elements that ultimately gives our guests a really amazing kiss goodnight,” says Aiello.
Shumway likens it, like many themed entertainment projects, to cooking: “You can have 1,000 different meals, but they all have the same ingredients.” For CineSational, the team looked at how to use those ingredients – projection, water, lighting, and drones – to create something unique and fresh that guests would want to experience every night.
“There are multiple things that were designed to bring the audience into the middle of the experience,” says McManus.
“We looked at the overall size of the canvas and expanded it to make it as wide as possible. We examined the surrounding buildings and area, making the show so expansive that you can’t see it from a single perspective. It completely fills your peripheral vision.”
They also worked hard to push the audio spectrum for the show, he adds:
“We designed an audio system that has multiple distributed nodes. We move sounds throughout the audience area in an almost three-dimensional fashion. We really pushed the boundaries of what we could do in that regard.”
“There was a lot of innovation on those technical fronts.”
A Universal first
For Shumway, drones add something special to the CineSational experience, yet they were a significant hurdle to clear.
“Drone technology is all very proprietary,” he explains. This was the first time that the technology had been incorporated into a complex nighttime experience. “It’s very advanced and safe, as you would expect it to be in a theme park.”
As an outdoor show in Orlando, the team need to optimise for variable weather conditions at any point in time. They examined the impact of high wind conditions and humidity on the drones, as well as other visual and atmospheric elements. “Then we created a system that dynamically creates provisions,” says McManus.
“If the drones can’t fly, for instance, automatically print media gets triggered and fills in that space. In high wind conditions, the fountains can be lowered, and we can change some of the effects to make accommodations.”
The primary purpose of all this technical innovation was to ensure the guest always sees the best possible outcome every night, never experiencing a compromised show.
“They see a show that is designed for those specific conditions that evening.”
The importance of story
In addition to the show’s technical innovations, emotion and storytelling play a key part in the visitor experience. In CineSational, IP moments are woven through an emotional arc.
Shumway says: “Because it's the nighttime spectacular, it's supposed to be the sprinkles on the icing on the cake of your day.
“That's the genius of Jason and his team…the way it all flows together.”
McManus says the different technologies became almost like instruments within an orchestra:
“We looked at every single piece of tech like an emotional device, the motion of fountains, the speed at which they can raise and lower, pyrotechnics, lasers; all these things speak to certain emotional responses.
“We looked at sounds in relation to technology, or emotions in relation to specific movements that things could do, and we paired those things together. This show is going to take people on a journey that goes through emotional chapters.
“The technology became the orchestra to do that.”
Aiello adds: “It's not just about putting pictures in the sky. It's following this story that we're telling, and that was important to us —that it wasn't just about the tech. “
TAIT and Universal explored which intellectual properties lent themselves to specific emotional buckets, looking for romance or heart within the Wizarding World, or a sense of adventure in brands like Fast and Furious, Jurassic World, and The Mummy.
The result is “a medley of music, part of an emotional ride,” says McManus.
“We looked at how technology pairs with our main characters to bring them into the third dimension. It’s happening all around guests. We’re using everything within our toolbox: the soundscape, fountains and lighting to create textures that extend the sensory atmosphere of these films into the real world.”
The score as a character
As the show’s title implies, music is a crucial element. CineSational runs for around 22 minutes, and during that time, music is the binding agent of the entire show, says Aiello: “We launched the score as a character.”
Choosing to base the narrative on the score was a key moment in development, bringing together all the technical and creative elements into a seamless emotional journey.
This differs from past Universal nighttime shows, which featured media, fountains, and projections within a highly structured production where each brand had about a minute and a half to two minutes, and the next segment would start immediately afterwards.
“We really wanted this new version of the show to feel like one single piece of music that flows seamlessly through the emotional story we tell.”
Tim Heintz composed a score that forms the backbone of CineSational. “The motivation of the show is that when you hear these classic themes, it sparks a memory in your head,” says Aiello.
These themes animate these memories, which are then displayed and manifested across the lagoon through fountain displays and map projection.
Rising to the challenge
With a brief to create something genuinely innovative, the team examined what makes a nighttime spectacular, and how to truly enhance it in terms of its emotional content.
“We've done about seven shows now out on the Universal Studios lagoon in this format,” says McManus. “CineSational took what we’ve learned and made everything better. We gained many valuable insights from each show, particularly in terms of creating a seamless experience.
“It wasn't about making the biggest or the grandest in terms of scale. We didn’t care about that arms race. Instead, we pushed the emotional content to a much deeper level than we've ever thought was possible before, and that is one of the most successful aspects of this new nighttime experience.”
Part of this was a love letter to the fans of not only these films and properties, but also to fans of this type of experience. “We wanted to create something world-class that could stand on its own as a product of excellence.”
With a mammoth project like CineSational, the team faced numerous challenges, including integrating new technologies and working overnight hours for testing and programming. “We might start at 11 pm and only have a few hours before sunrise,” says Shumway.
Revealing CineSational to the public
CineSational has directly impacted visitation patterns at Universal Studios Florida, keeping more guests in the park for more extended periods. It is also bringing annual passholders back later into the evening.
In 2024, the nighttime spectacular contributed to one of the most successful summers at Universal Orlando to date, and it continues to draw large crowds at the end of the night over a year later.
And it’s not just guests who are impressed; the project has also garnered industry recognition. CineSational: A Symphonic Spectacular was named a finalist in Fast Company’s 2025 Innovation by Design Awards, received a Bronze Clio Entertainment Award and won at the LIT Lighting Design Awards.
The CineSational development has also enabled Universal to offer larger and more impressive seasonal events, such as Halloween Horror Nights. In August 2025, Universal Orlando opened Haunt-O-Phonic: A Ghoulish Journey, which elevated the nighttime Halloween experience amid a rising trend for seasonal investment.
Haunt-O-Phonic takes place on the Universal Studios Florida lagoon, which is “very flexible”, says Aiello. The show, also brought to life by McManus and the TAIT team, “incorporates all of our media capabilities and fountains”.
Success for CineSational
Overall, the Universal team, says Aiello, is “really proud of this nighttime show; the ability to incorporate all these elements together. The goal is for guests to end their day reliving everything they experienced in a brand-new light, and that's what this show does.
“We’re very proud of the teams that were able to collaborate and bring their talents to create something really beautiful, and even before Epic opened, an epic show.”
As the industry gathers in Orlando for IAAPA Expo 2025, CineSational: A Symphonic Spectacular offers a timely example of reinvention grounded in both creativity and practical design. It is a case study in how innovation emerges when creative intent and technical expertise are developed hand in hand.
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