Queen’s Platinum Jubilee – Party at the Palace

NorthHouse Creative blended past, present, and future styles in celebration of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee at Buckingham Palace.

In January 2022, NorthHouse Creative were commissioned by BBC Studios to create a spectacular show for the Queen’s Platinum Party at the Palace with a projection-mapped Buckingham Palace taking centre stage. To create the visuals for the projection show, they combined archive imagery with a range of real-time and rendered motion design, pre-filmed footage, and visual effects. In addition to LED screen visuals, the creative team also designed the BBC Jubilee branding and broadcast graphics.

As lead designer Lydia Caplan explained, NorthHouse used the architecture of Buckingham Palace as a 3D canvas that could be transformed with their design ideas. For Alicia Keys’s performance, the team poured liquid platinum over the Palace. For Diana Ross’s, they swung disco balls around the Palace. When Duran Duran took the stage, the outer walls of the palace “peeled back” and displayed seventy layers of wallpaper inspired by Her Majesty’s styling over the years.

During production, the team used Notch to create a number of the large scale projection looks on the Palace as well as LED track visuals for the daytime artists. They also used Notch to animate and render 3D assets and create particle effects.

The industry and public responded positively, and Prince William himself expressed how delighted he was to see Buckingham Palace turned into a giant IMAX screen.

“In this case, when we needed to create a highly reflective disco ball but had no time to wait for a render from another application, we modelled the mirror ball in Cinema 4D and brought it into Notch for animation and rendering. Using a combination of Raytracing, Mirror Reflection, RT Refinement, a series of area lights and a skylight, we could create the effect we needed. All of the exports were completed within a few hours rather than a day of waiting on frames via other applications.”

Seán Bone, Motion Designer, NorthHouse Creative

Additional press coverage:
AV Interactive, Daily Mail, Tech Round, Tech Times.

Credits
Client: BBC Studios
Creative Director & NorthHouse Founder: Tom Bairstow
Producer: Alice Ryland
Lead Designer: Lydia Caplan

Lead Video Designer: Emile Frederick
Lead Technical Artist: Florian LeCoq
Motion Designers: Seán Bone, Daniel Richards, Liam Gilheany, Dana Couling, Dan Wise, Duncan Tune, Jamie Marshall, Arthur Broome, Luca Brenna