From Blank Wall To Living Forest: How To Make an Entrance (literally)

Insights

The Brief

Imagine stepping into a venue where the stage wall isn’t just a backdrop, it’s alive. Vines curling upward in sync with the music and the entire space feels like you’ve wandered into a digital jungle. That’s exactly what we created for our clients at Convene: an 18-meter wall transformed into an immersive, audio-reactive forest through large-scale projection mapping.

The brief was clear but bold: take a massive 6480×1080 canvas (yep, you read that right) and turn it into a living, breathing stage environment. The wall needed to:

Stretch seamlessly across 4 projectors.
Avoid spilling onto a cutout in the middle where the DJ lived.
Feel natural—like vines, branches, and growth could actually exist at that scale.
Respond to the music in real-time to keep the energy alive.

Not your everyday design challenge, right? Luckily, the unordinary is HLabs’ everyday.

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The Approach

When designing an entire forest that has to dance to the beat, you need more than good ideas, you need precision. Our approach was a mix of AI-powered ideation, motion design muscle, and some serious math.

Here’s how it went down:

Start with the numbers - We mapped out the wall’s dimensions and projector layout to the pixel. Accuracy was non-negotiable.
Gen AI as co-pilot - Veo 3.0 gave us early concept animations, while Runway ML + GPT prompts helped us dream up wild but believable plant references.
Style + motion lock - Once we had our enchanted “look,” we defined how vines should grow, loop, and pulse in time with the music.
Heavy-lifting in After Effects - We stitched the 6480×1080 canvas, aligned everything across 4 projectors, and built seamless loops that could run all night.
Testing, testing, testing - From slicing canvas mockups to checking blend lines, we obsessed over the details until playback was flawless.

The Design and Creative Tech teams tag-teamed the whole way through - writing prompts together, syncing visuals with stage reality, and QA-ing until every vine felt alive. Pre-rendered growth cycles and audio-reactive tests gave us that final spark of magic.

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The Conclusion

When the lights went down and the wall lit up, it was pure magic! The space shifted from a static stage to a lush, reactive forest that pulsed with the DJ’s set. Performers, crew, and clients all gave glowing feedback (pun intended). No glitches, no warping, no lag. Just pure, immersive magic.

But beyond the wow-factor, this project did a few important things:

It pushed the client into a new medium - projection as a stage experience.

It gave them an IP-worthy asset they can reuse and evolve.

It showed how Gen AI can be a creative partner - amazing for rapid ideation, not just final renders.

It reminded us that math + planning are everything when stitching across multiple projectors.

And, of course, it underscored what HLabs does best: rapid prototyping in new formats, blending emerging tools with technical know-how, and turning ambitious ideas into real, immersive experiences.

We don’t just design visuals - we create worlds people can step into. And this time, that world happened to be an enchanted digital forest.

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Let’s map out your next project? Whether on a wall, a website, or a campaign, we can make your vision come alive.

Get in Touch

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