Identity and visuals for the second annual ITV Studios’ drama upfronts event, welcoming 330 international buyers who had come to experience a taste of ITV’s drama slate for the upcoming year, hosted in London’s legendary Roundhouse.

After the success of last year’s event we went bigger and harder, delivering a truly immersive 360° audiovisual experience by combining large scale projections with the unique architecture of the iconic venue, turning it into a giant zoetrope of sights and sounds.

My role covered multiple aspects of this project, from working closely together with our small team to come up with the overall concept for the centerpiece of the event — the opening showreel — and designing the visuals for it, to then developing the visual identity of the event and art directing some of the individual presentation sessions.

Since the event was going to be held in such a characterful venue – The Roundhouse being a former railway engine shed and all – we knew we wanted to use the architecture of the space to work together with the visuals to create not just a flashy video content played in a great venue but a concept driven experience.

Our canvas for the visuals was gonna be the iconic inner ring of Roundhouse, consisting of 24 nearly 7m high arches that would hold projection voile in 19 of them, seamlessly joining the massive 14x7m main screen at the front of the house for a true 360° projection. This setup was engineered by the mad capabilities of Hawthorn, using 21 projectors and giving us 21600x2160 pixels to work with.

The showreel was the centerpiece of this project, opening the event and setting the tone for the next 2 hours.

The Roundhouse has a charming, unapologetic industrial interior to it, with a structure of clunky steel beams – it feels like being inside the inner workings of an old machine. The ring of arches at it’s center looked equally like a circus ring and a zoetrope to us, so me and Ben arrived at the idea of turning this place into a part-time steampunk circus arena (this being a joyous event full of spectacle) and a part-time giant mechanical zoetrope-like gadget (this being a film related event after all).

^ Initial moodboard for pitching the visual concept.
^ Live phone recording of the showreel from the event.

Design of the visual identity and branding of the event stemmed from the opening of the showreel, merging the golden chic of Victorian era circus with the worn down, industrial aesthetics of steampunk.

The look was used to create various assets, including an animated holding state loop that played in between the presentation sessions and during breaks, and for production company showreels that featured in some of the presentation sessions.