World of WearableArt 2025: RISE

Content Creation - Screen Design - Encoders

An audience of 60,000 comes together every year to escape into the World of WearableArt, taking art off the wall and onto the moving body. Often described as “breathtaking” and “spectacular”, the show is a fusion of fashion, art, theatre, circus, and live entertainment.

Our task was to create all the video content for the show, building visual worlds for the garments and performers to exist within. Our work took inspiration from the overall show theme RISE while simultaneously giving each of the six sections a unique identity within the show. We created original content for every moment, and incorporated the performers, garments, costumes and props through filming, 3D-scanning, and recreating elements. Our goal was to make a completely bespoke video show that was both visually impactful and allowed room for the spectacle that is WOW.

Spectral Matte

One of our biggest challenges was filming all the garments. Given the variety of colours and shapes the garments come in, and the compressed time we had to film, we knew that a traditional green screen pipeline was not going to work for us. Never ones to miss an opportunity to try something new, we developed a technique using infrared light as our key colour, allowing us to film garments of any colour or level of transparency all on a black background. To achieve this, we built our own high-powered IR lights to wash our backdrop in IR. More info on this here.

Alongside filming, we also chose to 3D scan the garments (and some of the dancers!) for the Myths & Legends section, enabling us to bring them into our 3D tools and relight and texture them as large-scale statues.

Technical Breakdown

  • 5x Switchable Film Surfaces (Opaque/Transparent)

  • 3x Tracked Projection Surfaces

  • 4x LED Columns on tracks, creating the central triagle screen

  • 12x Handheld LED Screens

  • 12x Projectors

  • 3x Disguise Media Servers

  • 12x Workstations/Render Nodes

  • 428,000 Frames Rendered during creation

  • 5400 hours of continuous rendering

  • 32tb of data created

Credits:
Delainy Jamahl - Lead Video Design
Rowan Pierce - Lead Video Design
Ruben O’Hara - Motion Designer
Rachel Nesser - Motion Designer
Jamie Berry - Video Design (Aotearoa)
Owen McCarthy - Motion Designer
Olivier Jean - Spectural Matter
Jason Naran - Camera Tech
Thomas Williams - Best Boy

Encoders

We also developed a draw wire encoder system to track the three flown volumes in the show. These encoders enable us to lock a projected image onto the surface as it moves up and down. More info on our encoders in the video below: