Block x Block; Block’s 16th Anniversary Celebration; Oakland
OneOneFour Productions Role: Strategic Production Leadership
Client: Whalefilm & Lally Events | Final Stakeholder: Block, Inc. (Square, CashApp, Tidal, Afterpay, Bitkey)
The Challenge
To celebrate Block’s 16th anniversary, the brand required a 1-million-square-foot festival-style environment in Oakland for 8,000 global employees. The project demanded a modular "blueprint" that allowed five distinct sub-brands to own their individual identities while maintaining total creative cohesion. Executing this required a massive 11-day load-in on a scale rarely seen in corporate experiential, involving a 250+ person union crew and dozens of specialized vendors.
The Work
Whalefilm engaged me to serve as the Strategic Production Lead and a partner in building an extended production infrastructure from the ground up. My objective was to architect a team and a logistical framework capable of handling the high-density requirements of a multi-agency production. I provided the senior-level visibility needed to manage a massive budget and a zero-margin timeline.
I oversaw the production architecture for the entire outdoor footprint, ensuring that the creative modularity designed by Whalefilm could be physically realized at scale:
Building the Production Ecosystem: Partnered with the agencies and partners to source, vet, and lead a high-performance production team, ensuring the right leadership was in place to manage 250+ union crew members.
Synchronizing Multi-Vendor Workstreams: Managed the pre-production and on-site logistics for five separate fabrication houses, alongside suppliers for staging, scaffolding, AV, and tenting, ensuring zero-fail coordination across 1M sq. ft.
Engineering Modular Flexibility: Overseeing the technical implementation of a custom scaffolding and furniture system that allowed each Block brand to customize their "block" while adhering to a unified master logistical plan.
Budget & Timeline Integrity: Managed the overall production spend and a complex 11-day load-in schedule, identifying and neutralizing potential friction points between various agencies and labor tiers before they impacted the site.
The Result
The result was a flawless three-day celebration that successfully hosted 8,000 guests across a high-spec, multi-zone environment. By building a resilient team and a bulletproof logistical framework, we ensured that every element—from speaker stages and a functioning tattoo shop to quiet networking zones—worked exactly as intended. The production established a new standard for how Block executes large-scale internal events.
Photo credit: Damion Hamilton
