When film becomes an immersive experience
Designing immersive film content for Arup’s 80th anniversary meant rethinking cinematic storytelling for one of the world’s most ambitious projection environments.
Find out how we transformed a venue into a living city.
The Challenge
World-renowned engineering consultancy Arup has helped shape some of the world’s most recognisable landmarks, from the Sydney Opera House and the Sagrada Família to much of London’s 2012 Olympic Park.
As the business approached its 80th anniversary, it wanted to celebrate the milestone with an evening reception that looked firmly to the future, rather than the past.
Bringing together CEOs, architects, designers and policymakers, the event centred around one ambitious question: How can we design a better future for our cities?
With an audience that was no stranger to high-profile networking events and polished corporate presentations, this couldn’t feel like another corporate event. Every part of the experience needed to be creatively surprising, intellectually ambitious and genuinely memorable.
The centrepiece would be a suite of immersive film content, created for one of London’s most extraordinary venues.
Four storeys high with projection across all four walls and the floor, The Lightroom’s 28 projectors create a 1,500m² canvas almost 27,000 pixels wide, wrapping around and beneath the audience.
It was an incredible creative opportunity – but it also meant rethinking almost every convention of filmmaking.
The Solution
Film as the thread that connected the experience
Rather than creating a single immersive film, we developed a suite of cinematic content that shaped the guest experience throughout the evening.
As guests entered The Lightroom, they caught their first glimpse of the vast showspace.
A gallery of UK city imagery, Arup projects and provocative questions introduced the evening’s central theme, while immersive visual content established the atmosphere before the live programme began.
What followed was an evening of thought leadership, discussion and inspiration, hosted by Monocle journalist Carlota Rebelo, with every keynote supported by bespoke immersive content designed specifically for the venue.
Bringing the city to life
Then the lights fell.
A moment of silence.
And the living, connected city sprang to life at a truly epic scale.
Designed specifically for The Lightroom’s four-storey, 1,500m² projection canvas, the immersive opening experience surrounded guests with the systems, networks and infrastructure that make urban life possible – many of them shaped by the people standing in the room.
The walls themselves seemed to open, revealing vast cityscapes at impossible scale.
Guests were challenged to think at the scale of whole cities, surrounded by specialist gigapixel helicopter photography that revealed urban environments in a way that would be impossible to experience anywhere else.
Finally, the narrative shifted to intimate portraits of real human lives – moments of joy, connection and shared experience that reminded this influential audience of the responsibility they carry in shaping the future.
A visual world for every speaker
The immersive storytelling continued throughout the evening. Each keynote was accompanied by a bespoke visual world that transformed around them, reinforcing their message and ensuring every presentation felt visually distinctive while remaining part of one cohesive narrative.
To close the evening, Arup Young Creator Iffat Rahman delivered a powerful performance of her poem Cities of the Future. As she spoke, illustrations created by Arup illustrator Ahmad Harun sprang to animated life across the walls, providing an emotional finale that perfectly captured the optimism and ambition at the heart of the event.
Rethinking the language of filmmaking
Creating content for The Lightroom demanded an entirely new approach to filmmaking.
Four storeys high, with projection across all four walls and the floor, its 28 projectors create a 1,500m² image almost 27,000 pixels wide that wraps around and beneath the audience. It offered extraordinary creative freedom – but conventional filmmaking techniques simply didn’t work at that scale.
Camera moves that felt elegant in the edit became physically overwhelming. Footage that appeared dynamic on a monitor became disorientating when projected around an audience. Every shot had to be rigorously tested in the space, refined back in the edit suite and tested again. Composition had to work not just within a frame, but across an entire room.
Using The Lightroom’s Holoplot spatial audio system, we also developed a visual and sonic language that subtly guided guests’ attention through the story.
Combined with specialist aerial cinematography, bespoke animation, motion graphics and environmental storytelling, the result was a cinematic environment designed exclusively for this extraordinary venue.
The Impact
Immersive film became the driving force behind Arup’s 80th anniversary—transforming a milestone celebration into an experience that was as thought-provoking as it was visually spectacular. From the opening cinematic journey to the bespoke immersive worlds supporting keynote speakers and the animated finale, every piece of content worked together to challenge one of the world’s most influential engineering audiences to think differently about the future of our cities.
Designed specifically for The Lightroom, the content took full advantage of one of the UK’s most ambitious immersive environments. Film, animation, motion graphics and spatial audio combined to create a cinematic experience that simply couldn’t have existed anywhere else—surrounding guests with the scale, complexity and humanity of urban life while bringing Arup’s vision to life.
For an audience of CEOs, policymakers, architects and designers who had experienced countless conferences and corporate events, the response was overwhelmingly positive. Guests described the evening as “a spectacular evening”, praised the “inspiring discussions and amazing backdrops”, and commented that it was “great to see a new direction set for Arup”.
