Jake Kavanagh of Lewiston soaked in the spectacle at the 50-yard line.

It was three days before the Super Bowl. Again and again, The Who rehearsed on the big game’s Halftime Show stage.

“The whole crew rolls the stage on, The Who jumps up and does their performance and they roll it all off,” Kavanagh said. “And everybody has a stop watch to see if they’ve hit their mark. And then, they do it all over again.”

Why was Kavanagh there?

Little pieces of the illuminated stage — a kind of pulsating, Earthbound flying saucer — were his.

“To be able to know that I had joined that process in August, had been working through every revision and watched it come to life,” Kavanagh said. “To see them up there on the stage was awesome. It’s pretty intense. They are iconic.”

It’s the payoff for work that mostly happens from Kavanagh’s home studio, running a computer-assisted design program in front of two monitors.

He spent the day watching The Who perform seven or eight times. Then Kavanagh, a football fan, returned home to Lewiston.

“I was not at the Super Bowl,” he said. Had he stayed, his access would have been limited to the show, not the game. “Watching it on TV was just as exciting, and I got to watch the game, too.”

Kavanagh is an art designer. For the past two years, he has worked part-time for a boutique design firm based in Connecticut and California called Tribe Inc.

For Tribe and founder/designer Bruce Rodgers, Kavanagh helped create designs for two Super Bowl Halftime Shows, assisted on concert stages for Jay-Z and Eminem and helped on designs for an inaugural ball for President Obama.

It’s heady stuff for a guy who worried that he might be unable to get a good job when he moved here seven years ago with his wife, Amy, a Lewiston native.

“I was in a pretty good place,” he said. “I was teaching theatrical set design.”

There seemed to be little room for someone with his resume. Then he made a lucky e-mail contact with Rodgers.

When Rodgers saw Kavanagh’s work, he gave him a shot.

For Kavanagh, part of the thrill comes from fleshing out Rodger’s detailed drawings, making them three-dimensional, giving them their shape and height, and watching as the computer images continue to evolve into a stage.

“I’ve had a good couple of years,” said Kavanagh, interviewed by phone Thursday from Sarasota, Fla., where he is on a job.

The next weeks will take him to Los Angeles and New York. Some of the work will be for Tribe.

Some will be for himself, where he can come up with original designs and see them through.

In the past year, Kavanagh has created his company, JK Designs. On his own, he has yet to shape pop culture happenings, but he has his own sandbox.

“I don’t know where that will take me,” he said.

He has created trade show exhibits for Wright Express, based in Salt Lake City.

“They have given me extraordinary creative freedom,” he said.

Kavanagh likes the work, but he hopes to one day design a children’s museum and he’s pursuing work for TV and film.

At this stage, they are bonuses.

“I’m doing really well,” he said.

Only two weeks ago, he attended a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden by Brazilian singer Ivete Sangalo.

Through Tribe, he helped design the massive stage for the pop singer, who is a household name in Brazil.

Though largely unknown in America, she overwhelmed her audience and gave Kavanagh another Who-like moment.

“To see her out there with 17,000 or 18,000 fans going nuts and we’re standing in the control booth just watching it, knowing that we helped create it,” he said. “That is a pretty exciting feeling.”

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