Gillian Tan

The Coleman/Zippel/Gelbart musical at the Royal Academy of Music — a show that runs two worlds in parallel: the ‘real’ Los Angeles of a writer adapting his novel for the screen, and the black-and-white ‘reel’ world of the film noir he’s creating. Both plots bleed into each other, and the design has to hold that permeability.

The video design worked across green screen, graphics, and animation to build the film noir visual language and manage the transitions between worlds. The design team developed a shared visual grammar that could make the logic of the dual timeline legible without being illustrative — letting the imagery do the scene-setting work so the performances could carry everything else.