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Challenge

As Arup approached its 80th Anniversary, the world-renowned engineering consultancy wanted to create more than just a celebration. The brief was to deliver an evening reception in central London for up to 300 VIP guests that positioned Arup as a modern, forward-thinking convener of people and ideas - bringing together CEOs, designers and policymakers to discuss the future of cities.

The event needed to feel meaningful, immersive and intellectually ambitious, rather than simply another corporate networking evening. The audience were experienced, influential guests who had “seen it all before”, so every part of the experience needed to feel creatively surprising and genuinely thought-provoking.

To deliver the scale of experience required, we selected The Lightroom in King’s Cross - a truly huge immersive venue featuring four-storey projection across all four walls and the floor. Its 28 projectors covered an astonishing 1,500m² of projectable surface, creating one of the most technically ambitious environments possible for live storytelling.

At the heart of the evening was one central question:

How can we design a better future for our cities?

To bring that question to life, the event required a major immersive film experience that would fully utilise the venue’s scale and move guests emotionally into the evening’s discussions. This became both a serious filmmaking challenge and an opportunity to create truly one-of-a-kind immersive content.

Solution

The concept for the film was designed to help the audience discover the city not as a static skyline, but as a finely balanced living system powering the lives of millions of people. The ambition was to move guests from awe to responsibility - encouraging them to feel the scale, beauty and complexity of urban life while recognising the importance of the decisions made by the people shaping future cities. People like them.

The resulting film became a totally immersive, 21,000 pixel-wide journey through the life of the modern city. As the kick-off moment arrived, the gallery went dark before shards of light opened huge four-storey windows into cities around the world. Layers of sound and visual texture built gradually as sunlight moved across global urban landscapes.

The narrative explored the systems and spaces that connect cities together - transport, infrastructure, energy, public space and human interaction - before asking the audience to “think big enough to see whole cities”. This culminated in a fully immersive panoramic reveal of London wrapped around the Thames, stretching above and around guests in every direction.

From there, the film became a cinematic trip through urban life: impossible aerial vistas, intimate human moments, infrastructure close-ups, transport systems, parks, playgrounds and the everyday lives being lived within the built environment. The script deliberately pushed beyond conventional engineering language:

“Bigger than how high we build. Bigger than skylines and square metres.”

This was not a film about buildings. It was a film about systems, people and the future.

The film also played a critical role within the wider event experience. It set the emotional and intellectual tone for the evening’s programme of thought leadership, discussion and debate, preparing guests for the conversations that followed around the future of cities and the responsibilities of those shaping them.

Creating content at this scale required the team to rethink the language of filmmaking entirely. Traditional film grammar simply did not apply within an immersive environment this large. Movement became physical. Camera moves that felt elegant on a monitor became genuinely disorientating when projected at full scale around an audience. Composition had to work not just within a frame, but across an entire room.

Sound design became equally important. Using Lightroom’s Holoplot sound system, the team directed guests’ attention to specific moments and images throughout the experience while amplifying the scale and emotional immersion of the environment.

The technical demands were enormous. A single full-resolution still image could exceed 130GB, while animation and rendering across such a large-format canvas created significant production challenges. Yet those constraints became part of the creative opportunity. The final result was not a brand film stretched across a large screen, but a cinematic environment designed specifically for The Lightroom.

Results

The film delivered the intended “wow” moment. For an audience familiar with polished corporate storytelling, it landed as something genuinely different.

More importantly, it helped shift Arup’s 80th anniversary away from a retrospective celebration and towards a live, urgent conversation about the next 80 years - a future shaped by many of the people in the room that evening.

Guest feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with attendees describing the event as “a spectacular evening” and praising the “inspiring discussions and amazing backdrops”. Others commented that it was “great to see a new direction set for Arup”.

Dr Erin Gill, Arup’s Global Corporate Affairs and Partnerships Leader, said:

“Our ‘Arup at 80’ celebration in London needed to be creatively surprising, beautifully executed, and genuinely meaningful. Instead of offering our guests self-congratulatory opulence, we gave them ideas that will shape the future delivered as part of an exhilarating show. It was a night to remember for all the right reasons.”