The head designer from The ATS Team (the company who creates the American Ninja Warrior course), shares the process of how a new course gets brainstormed, designed, and created for each new season of Ninja Warrior.
We start in November, December with loose concepts of obstacles that get turned into more of a conceptual render. It’s a sketched up model that doesn’t have any of the actual mechanics of how an obstacle would be built, but it has shapes representing obstacles so that we can talk about it with a visual. A lot of times these things are hard to understand without visuals. From there [the producers] either like it or they don’t. If they like it, it generally goes to the shop with whatever instructions they need. That’s where we are right now. The demos we’ve had with producers have been just bits of obstacles showing movement, showing concepts. Proof that these ideas could work. Then in January we’ll begin to put them into a full pool of space.
