USC × UCLA Dual Graduation — Walnut

The honey yellow, deep red, royal blue, and gold palette wove USC's cardinal-and-gold against UCLA's blue-and-gold into a single composition where neither school dominated. Dual-school grad installs fail when one palette eats the other — a wall of cardinal red kills the UCLA blue, a wall of royal blue kills the USC red. I planned this one with gold doing the bridge work: gold belongs to both schools, so threading it through the garland gave the install a continuous note that tied the two color stories together. Honey yellow softened the deep red so the cardinal didn't read as a single saturated block.

The composition centered on a white rectangular backdrop that hosted both university signs side by side at equal scale — neither one elevated above the other, neither one off to the corner. Organic balloon garland threaded across the backdrop crown and down both sides, blending all four palette tones in a deliberate pattern so the red and the blue alternated rather than clustering. Each university sign sat against the white panel field at the eye-level of the camera's standing-shot frame, so both graduates' affiliations read clean in every photograph.

My team built the white rectangular backdrop in our studio and sized it specifically for dual-sign placement — wide enough that the USC and UCLA signs didn't crowd each other but narrow enough to fit a single camera frame. The garland used biodegradable latex throughout, with the deep red and royal blue balloons placed in alternating cluster pairs across the crown rather than in solid color blocks, which would have visually split the install down the middle.

A private home in Walnut gave the install bright residential daylight and the constraint of working against an existing wall. The challenge was scale: a single-school grad install can fill a backdrop with one team's color, but a dual-school install has to balance two visual identities on the same panel without the eye picking sides. I placed the backdrop on the wall facing the strongest indirect light so both red and blue tones held their values cleanly, and kept the gold accents distributed evenly so the warm note bridged the cool blue and the warm red.

Two schools, one panel, and the gold doing the work in between — that was what kept this install from reading as a divided composition.