A new showreel is a useful kind of mirror. You sit down to cut it and you find out what kind of year you actually had. This one turned out to be a year of UEFA, LEGO, F1, ASICS, Heineken and Hennessy work, of gamified virtual worlds and augmented activations on tour, and of the projects we kept arguing about in the studio long after they shipped.

A year of work, in one cut

Crafting connections beyond boundaries

Audiences don't want to be marketed at. They want to feel something true about the brand in front of them, and immersive storytelling is how we keep landing it. When the work lands properly, people lean in. They talk. They tell other people. They come back.

How we get there shifts per brief. AR, VR, MR, AI, data visualisation, robotics, kinetic builds, volumetric capture. Our tech-agnostic approach means we're not married to any of them. We choose the fit, then build a strategy long enough to evolve as the tools do.

A legacy of experimentation

Solarflare was founded by Stuart Cupit, Jay Short, John Martinelli and Lee Spooner on a single shared instinct: the most interesting thing you can do with a new technology is hand it to a brand and ask what story it wants to tell. Eleven years on, that instinct still runs the studio.

Our annual showreel is a fantastic reminder of all the amazing projects we've worked on, all the great talent we've worked with, and most importantly, all the people who have enjoyed the experiences we create.

Stuart Cupit, Chief Technology Officer

Where we put it to work

Sport, retail, entertainment, education. The industry changes, but the question doesn't: what's the experience worth telling? A few of this year's answers: Hennessy's AI album-artwork tribute to fifty years of hip hop, an audio-visual Halloween experience for Abode festival-goers, Siemens's volumetric narrative at COP28, the UK rail industry's first foray into VR training, and UNWTO's kinetic centrepiece for World Tourism Day.

Measuring what matters

None of this is worth much if we can't show what it did. Every project ships with engagement monitoring. Dwell time, audience sentiment, interaction patterns. A campaign isn't a moment in a venue, it's a body of evidence about what worked and why. That data is what lets us refine the next thing instead of starting it from scratch.

What's your next big swing?

If something here sparked an idea, even a half-formed one, we want to hear about it. The full showreel is on YouTube, and the studio is always up for a conversation. Get in touch.