Launching World Health Expo came down to one minute, on one very tall screen: the Burj Khalifa. I led the creative that turned a flat, streamlined brand into something built for the world’s tallest building.
WHX is Informa Markets’ new global health expo brand, and it needed a launch moment to match its ambition. The brief was a 60-second film projected onto the Burj Khalifa, with highly technical specs, a challenging timeline and a deadline in the middle of the holiday season.
A flat, streamlined brand had to come alive across an iconic piece of architecture, designed to stretch, wrap and scale with the building rather than fight it.
Starting from the client’s storyboard, I reshaped the narrative for projection mapping: simpler, bolder and volumetric, thinking about depth, shadow and perspective on a building people see from every angle.
Projection mapping is hard to picture from a storyboard, so every scene was previsualised on the building itself.
Real-world mockups let the client see the film at scale before a single frame hit the tower. That shared picture kept everyone aligned when the storyboard was restructured midway through, with new visuals and music squeezed into the same 60 seconds.
The 6K canvas pushed render times to 36 hours a pass. Optimising the effects and pre-rendering brought that down to 2.5.
With a small team and the holidays closing in, that was the difference between iterating and hoping. It meant the team could keep adapting to the client right up to the night, without losing quality.
